MILTON AVERY

  • Milton Avery

    A Sense of Place

    Keenly aware of the grand landscape tradition, as practiced by Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt of the Hudson River School, Avery deliberately chose a non-heroic exploration of the canvas. Accessible and intimate, as if they are views from a kitchen window, Avery’s paintings reject outsized ambition yet leaves us with an enduring sense of place. He managed to enhance the role of nature, not through grandeur, but through evocations of quiet emotion. Using raw canvas and sparse pigment, Avery often applied color more as stain than painted surface, a technique that can be seen as an influence on color field painting. Avery created a world of outlined and interlocking forms to represent the flattened landscape. Throughout his artistic career, color remained the dominant force, especially as he became less concerned with subject details. This brought greater focus to the shapes and colors within them. Avery’s art is liminal - not fully abstract and yet not distinctly figurative. As a consequence, over time, his work has been hard to classify into a single category.

     

    Waqas Wajahat
  • Winding Stream, 1962, Oil on canvas

    Winding Stream, 1962

    Oil on canvas

    40 x 50 inches
  • Spring, 1941, Oil on canvas

    Spring, 1941

    Oil on canvas

    33 x 25 inches
  • Parade of Trees, 1956, oil on canvas

    Parade of Trees, 1956

    oil on canvas
     30 x 38 inches

     
  • Quivering Trees, 1954, Oil on canvas

     

     

    Quivering Trees, 1954

    Oil on canvas

    48 x 32 inches
  • "With its striking simplification of form and composition, Avery's late work constitutes a powerful closing chapter to his life in art. Like Henri Matisse or Paul Klee, whose careers culminated in bold and powerful expressions of a vision honed over a lifetime, Avery's late works also draw upon decades of artistic creation while at the same time revealing new perceptions and syntheses that look forward to the next chapter in America art, a chapter in which timeless ideas are conveyed by deliberately iconic canvases on a scale large enough to confront and envelop the viewer."
     
    Eliza Rathbone, Chief Curator at The Phillips Collection
  • Hills and Fields, 1943, Watercolor on paper

     

     

    Hills and Fields, 1943

    Watercolor on paper

    22 x 30 inches
  • Landscape, 1953, Watercolor on paper

    Landscape, 1953

    Watercolor on paper

    22 1/4 x 30 1/2 inches
  • Fishing Wharf, 1957, Watercolor, gouache & oil crayon on paper

    Fishing Wharf, 1957

    Watercolor, gouache & oil crayon on paper

    17 x 22 inches
  • Abandoned Pier, 1957, Watercolor on paper

     

     

    Abandoned Pier, 1957

    Watercolor on paper

    20 x 26 inches
  • Red Boat in Green Sea, 1960, Watercolor on paper

    Red Boat in Green Sea, 1960

    Watercolor on paper

    25 x 35 inches
  • Fish Plate, c. 1930s, Watercolor on paper

    Fish Plate, c. 1930s

    Watercolor on paper

    15 1/4 x 22 5/8 inches

     
  • Gaspé Village, 1939, Oil on canvas

    Gaspé Village, 1939

    Oil on canvas

    28 x 36 inches

     
  • Safe Harbor, 1938, Watercolor on paper

    Safe Harbor, 1938

    Watercolor on paper

    22 x 30 inches
  • "What was Avery’s repertoire? 
    His living room, Central Park, his wife Sally, his daughter March, the beaches and moutains where they summered; cows, fish heads, the flight of birds; his friends and whatever world strayed through his studio; a domestic, unheroic cast . But from these there have been fashioned great canvases, that far from the casual and transitory implications of the subjects, have always a gripping lyricism, and often achieve the permanence and monumentality of Egypt."
    —Mark Rothko
  • Young Writer, 1942, Oil on canvas

    Young Writer, 1942

    Oil on canvas

    48 x 32 inches

     
  • Red Anemones, 1942, Oil on canvas

    Red Anemones, 1942

    Oil on canvas
     
  • Brown Jacket, 1962, Oil on canvas board

    Brown Jacket, 1962

    Oil on canvas board

    24 x 18 inches

     
  • Seated Woman in Orange Dress, c.1930s, Gouache on dark green paper

    Seated Woman in Orange Dress, c.1930s

    Gouache on dark green paper

    19 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches

     
  • Girl with Wicker Chairs, c. 1930s, Watercolor on paper

    Girl with Wicker Chairs, c. 1930s

    Watercolor on paper

    22 x 15 inches
  • "It is difficult to account for the individuality of Avery's art. There is the sublime lightness of Avery's hand on one side, and the morality of his eyes on the other: the exact loyalty of these eyes to what they experience. The question has to do with exactly how Avery locks his flat, lambent planes together; with the exact dosage of light in his colors (all of which seem to have an admixture of white); with exactly how he inflects planes in depth without shading, and so on. Of course, all successful art confronts us with this factor of exactness, but rarely does the necessity of exactness cover as much as it does in Avery's case" 
    Clement Greenberg 
  • Milton Avery, Studio View (Chop Suey), c. 1930s

    Studio View (Chop Suey), c. 1930s

    Watercolor on paper

    22 1/8 x 15 1/4 inches

     
  • Railyards, c.1930s, Watercolor on paper

    Railyards, c.1930s

    Watercolor on paper

    21 7/8 x 15 1/8 inches

     
  • Tugboats in Harbor, c. 1930s, Gouache on dark gray paper

    Tugboats in Harbor, c. 1930s

    Gouache on dark gray paper

    18 x 23 inches

     
  • Untitled (The El), c. late 1920s, Lithocrayon on paper

    Untitled (The El), c. late 1920s

    Lithocrayon on paper

    15 x 12 inches