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Milton Avery
A Sense of PlaceKeenly 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
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Winding Stream, 1962
Oil on canvas40 x 50 inches
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Spring, 1941
Oil on canvas33 x 25 inches
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Parade of Trees, 1956
oil on canvas30 x 38 inches
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Quivering Trees, 1954
Oil on canvas48 x 32 inches
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"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
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Hills and Fields, 1943
Watercolor on paper22 x 30 inches
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Landscape, 1953
Watercolor on paper22 1/4 x 30 1/2 inches
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Fishing Wharf, 1957
Watercolor, gouache & oil crayon on paper17 x 22 inches
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Abandoned Pier, 1957
Watercolor on paper20 x 26 inches
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Red Boat in Green Sea, 1960
Watercolor on paper25 x 35 inches
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Fish Plate, c. 1930s
Watercolor on paper15 1/4 x 22 5/8 inches
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Gaspé Village, 1939
Oil on canvas28 x 36 inches
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Safe Harbor, 1938
Watercolor on paper22 x 30 inches
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"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
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Young Writer, 1942
Oil on canvas48 x 32 inches
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Red Anemones, 1942
Oil on canvas -
Brown Jacket, 1962
Oil on canvas board24 x 18 inches
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Seated Woman in Orange Dress, c.1930s
Gouache on dark green paper19 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches
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Girl with Wicker Chairs, c. 1930s
Watercolor on paper22 x 15 inches
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Studio View (Chop Suey), c. 1930s
Watercolor on paper22 1/8 x 15 1/4 inches
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Railyards, c.1930s
Watercolor on paper21 7/8 x 15 1/8 inches
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Tugboats in Harbor, c. 1930s
Gouache on dark gray paper18 x 23 inches
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Untitled (The El), c. late 1920s
Lithocrayon on paper15 x 12 inches
MILTON AVERY
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