“I do not use linear perspective, but achieve depth by color – the function of one color with another. I strip the design to essentials; the facts do not interest me as much as the essence of nature.” – Milton Avery
Known for his lyrical use of color, Milton Avery was a seminal American Modernist. His flattened spaces, featuring simplified, rounded forms, often led to comparisons with Henri Matisse. In a 1982 New York Times article Hilton Kramer explained the paradox of Avery’s work – it was too representational for the Abstract Expressionists, and too abstract for the realists.
Largely self-taught, Avery began studying art part-time later in life, while working various jobs to support himself and his family. In 1925 he moved to New York City, and the following year married fellow artist Sally Michel. The couple attended classes at the Art Students League, and were very involved with the New York art scene. Avery began exhibiting his work regularly, and in 1928 had his first solo exhibition at the Opportunity Gallery. While his career grew, it was his wife’s illustration work was able to support their young family, thus allowing Avery to paint full-time.
By the 1940s Avery’s style showed influences of both the Fauvists and some of the German Expressionists. His flattened spaces, featuring simplified, rounded forms, were often compared to those of Henri Matisse. Both Avery and Matisse believed creating emotion in their work was more important than producing a precise replication of the world around them. Beginning in 1943 Avery was represented by Paul Rosenberg, who contracted to purchase fifty of his paintings a year. His connection with the gallery lasted for eight years, and in 1950, Rosenberg sold Avery’s paintings to Roy Neuberger. By 1959 Neuberger had over a hundred pieces by Avery. In 1944 Avery had his first solo exhibition at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington D.C., and by 1947, received his first retrospective exhibition, titled My Daughter, March at the Durand-Ruel Gallery.
After suffering a heart attack, Avery took a temporary pause from painting and instead worked with monotype prints. A visit to Europe in the summer of 1952 rejuvenated his art. After returning to painting he began working with Fauvist techniques, limiting his palette, while creating atmosphere and depth through a smaller number of luminous colors.
The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective exhibition of Avery in 1960, and three years later he was chosen to be a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After suffering a second heart attack in 1963 Avery never fully recovered. He died two years later, to be buried at the Artist’s Cemetery in Woodstock, New York.
An incredibly successful colorist, utterly lacking in pretension, Avery created scenes of domesticity and simplified landscapes that exude a sense of intimacy and safety. While Avery’s indefinable position between abstraction and realism might have confused critics, categorizing his art was unnecessary in cementing its power. His work was a nostalgic reverie that helped soak up some of its viewer’s longing for a better place, and perhaps a better existence; it was a longing for a safer time, an escape from a very daunting present. Many fellow artists gave Milton Avery the compliment of being a ‘painter’s painter.’
Written by Kira Romano