(1885-1965) |
(1885-1965) |
"While supporting himself with factory jobs, Milton Avery studied
life drawing and painting at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford (enrolling
sometime between 1905 and 1911). In 1917 he began working nights in order to paint in the
daytime. The following year he transferred to the School of the Art Society of Hartford. "Avery's landscapes and seascapes of the early
1920s use the heavy impasto, light palette, and atmospheric mistiness of the American
Impressionists Ernest Lawson and John Henry Twachtman. With his move to New York in 1925,
where he encountered the work of Matisse and the pre-Cubist work of Picasso, Avery began to
simplify forms into broad areas of close-valued color. Although Avery's art became
increasingly abstract, he never abandoned representational subject matter, painting figure
groups, still lifes, landscapes, and seascapes. His mature style, developed by the
mid-1940s, is characterized by a reduction of elements to their essential forms,
elimination of detail, and surface patterns of flattened shapes, filled with arbitrary
color in the manner of Matisse."Early in Avery's career, when Social Realism
and American Scene painting were the prevailing artistic styles, the semi-abstract
tendencies in his work were viewed by many as too radical. In the 1950s, a period
dominated by Abstract Expressionism, he was overlooked by
critics because of his adherence to recognizable subject matter. Nevertheless, his work,
with its emphasis on color, was important to many younger artists, particularly to Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb,
Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, and
other Color Field painters."- From Patterson Sims, "Whitney Museum of American Art: selected works from the permanent collection" |
