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Milton Avery
1885–1965
BirthplaceAltmar, New York, United States of America, North America
Death placeNew York, New York, United States of America
BiographyAn artist who remained independent of any particular school or “ism,” Milton Avery developed a reductive mature representational style in which forms in nature are simplified to glowing flat areas of subtle color with lyrical but elusive effect. Avery was born in Sand Bank (later Altmar), New York, but grew up near Hartford, Connecticut. As a young man, he worked in factories to support his impoverished family. He studied art briefly in Hartford and began the first of an annual series of summer excursions to various picturesque locations as far-flung as Quebec and Mexico. In 1924, on a return trip to Gloucester, Massachusetts, Avery met Sally Michel (1902–2003), an aspiring artist from Brooklyn, New York, whom he married two years later; her work as an illustrator and devotion to her husband’s art freed Avery to paint full time for the rest of his career.
After moving to New York in the mid-1920s, Avery began attending classes at the Art Students League while his style evolved from a rather academic realism to a more imaginative approach in which he flattened and simplified forms and experimented with color used for purely decorative value. Avery’s development accelerated under the influence of naïve and European modernist artists whose work he admired. In particular, the pure, expressive color and decorative playfulness of the French master Henri Matisse (1869–1954) encouraged Avery to further reduce forms to their essence and to emphasize the rhythmic interplay of shapes and voids. He typically used a stiff brush and thinned his paints to the consistency of a transparent wash to give his broad areas of color an almost transparent, glowing lightness and subtle texture. Avery painted interiors and figural works, often depicting family members as well as landscapes. His late works, many painted on large canvases, are nearly abstract in their reduction of a scene to a few flat areas of softly brushed, often arbitrary color. Avery’s tranquil, refined, sometimes whimsical images never entirely depart from nature, but they were a major influence on the development of pure abstraction in the paintings of his friends and artistic associates Mark Rothko (1903–1970) and Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974).
Avery was a passionate draftsman and printmaker who worked in several print media. While recovering from a major heart attack in 1949, he experimented with monotypes (single impressions made by applying a sheet of paper to an inked surface). He also made watercolor paintings, several of which earned awards.
Although Avery never achieved financial success, he received significant critical recognition as early as 1928, when his first solo show was held. Fifteen years later, he was honored with a one-person museum exhibition at the Phillips Memorial Gallery (now the Phillips Collection) in Washington, D.C.; the founder, modernist collector Duncan Phillips, became one of the artist’s important patrons. Although Avery is now recognized as a modern master, his achievement was nonetheless somewhat eclipsed in the decades following his death by the prominence of his younger abstractionist colleagues.
After moving to New York in the mid-1920s, Avery began attending classes at the Art Students League while his style evolved from a rather academic realism to a more imaginative approach in which he flattened and simplified forms and experimented with color used for purely decorative value. Avery’s development accelerated under the influence of naïve and European modernist artists whose work he admired. In particular, the pure, expressive color and decorative playfulness of the French master Henri Matisse (1869–1954) encouraged Avery to further reduce forms to their essence and to emphasize the rhythmic interplay of shapes and voids. He typically used a stiff brush and thinned his paints to the consistency of a transparent wash to give his broad areas of color an almost transparent, glowing lightness and subtle texture. Avery painted interiors and figural works, often depicting family members as well as landscapes. His late works, many painted on large canvases, are nearly abstract in their reduction of a scene to a few flat areas of softly brushed, often arbitrary color. Avery’s tranquil, refined, sometimes whimsical images never entirely depart from nature, but they were a major influence on the development of pure abstraction in the paintings of his friends and artistic associates Mark Rothko (1903–1970) and Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974).
Avery was a passionate draftsman and printmaker who worked in several print media. While recovering from a major heart attack in 1949, he experimented with monotypes (single impressions made by applying a sheet of paper to an inked surface). He also made watercolor paintings, several of which earned awards.
Although Avery never achieved financial success, he received significant critical recognition as early as 1928, when his first solo show was held. Fifteen years later, he was honored with a one-person museum exhibition at the Phillips Memorial Gallery (now the Phillips Collection) in Washington, D.C.; the founder, modernist collector Duncan Phillips, became one of the artist’s important patrons. Although Avery is now recognized as a modern master, his achievement was nonetheless somewhat eclipsed in the decades following his death by the prominence of his younger abstractionist colleagues.