The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. will open Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea on 24 October 2026, the first exhibition to look in depth at how friendship and shared summers on the Massachusetts coast shaped three of the most influential American artists of the 20th century. On view through 24 January 2027, the show gathers roughly 90 paintings, watercolors, drawings and sketches tracing the exchanges that developed among Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko over four decades.

The story begins with Avery, the eldest of the three, who first visited Cape Ann in Gloucester in the 1920s and drew the two younger artists there in the 1930s. Their summers of painting, sketching and arguing about art away from New York became an engine of experimentation, and the exhibition follows how that shared place and shared palette helped push all three from representational imagery toward the abstraction that would define postwar American painting. Avery's luminous harbor scenes sit beside Rothko's early figurative canvases and Gottlieb's beach-box motifs, the germ of his celebrated Pictographs.

The Phillips has deep ties to all three painters: it was the first museum in the United States to acquire an Avery, established a permanent Rothko gallery in 1960, and holds major Gottliebs. Conservation research using advanced imaging fed into the project, and several loans from family collections have never been shown publicly.

Organized with the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester and curated by Eliza Rathbone, the show draws on 16 lending museums, including the National Gallery of Art, which contributes ten Rothkos. A Rizzoli catalog with contributions from the artists' families accompanies the exhibition.