Milton Avery American, 1885-1965

Milton Avery (b. 1885, Altmar, New York; d. 1965, New York City), one of the great American colorists of the twentieth century, distilled landscape, still life, and figuration into understated yet euphoric compositions of light, form, and pattern. Known as the “American Fauve,” Avery made paintings that bridged Impressionism’s dedication to experiential representation, American modernism’s tendency toward flatness, and Abstract Expressionism’s concern with surface. In 1951, the artist said: “I like to seize one sharp instant in nature, imprison it by means of ordered shapes and space relationships to convey the ecstasy of the moment. To this end I eliminate and simplify, leaving nothing but color and pattern.” Prefiguring later developments in Color Field painting, he worked with broad swaths of thinned-out paint, eschewing modeling and perspective in favor of unmodulated planes of color and flattened space. Despite his pared-down style, Avery remained devoted to subject matter, depicting landscapes, domestic scenes, and other images from everyday life with unbridled intimacy. Avery’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Albright-Knox, Buffalo; MoMA, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and Tate Modern, London; among other public and private collections.