Milton Clark Avery (; March 7, 1885 – January 3, 1965) was an American modern painter. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City. He was the husband of artist Sally Michel Avery and the father of artist March Avery.

Early life

The son of a tanner, Avery began working at a local factory at the age of 16 and supported himself for decades with a succession of blue-collar jobs. The death of his brother-in-law in 1915 left Avery, as the sole remaining adult male in his household, responsible for the support of nine female relatives. His interest in art led him to attend classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford, and over a period of years, he painted in obscurity while receiving a conservative art education.

Career

For several years in the late 1920s through the late 1930s, Avery practiced painting and drawing at the Art Students League of New York. Roy Neuberger saw his work and thought he deserved recognition. Determined to get the world to know and respect Avery's work, Neuberger bought over 100 of his paintings, starting with Gaspé Landscape, and lent or donated them to museums all over the world. With Avery's work rotating through high-profile museums, he came to be a highly respected and successful painter.

In the 1930s, he was befriended by Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko among many other artists living in New York City in the 1930s–40s. Avery's use of glowing color and simplified forms was an influence on the younger artists. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.

Avery had a serious heart attack in 1949. and is buried in the Artist's Cemetery in Woodstock, Ulster County, New York.  After his passing his widow, Sally Avery, donated his personal papers to the Archives of American Art, a research center of the Smithsonian Institution.

Style and influence

Avery's work is seminal to American abstract painting—while his work is clearly representational, it focuses on color relations and is not concerned with creating the illusion of depth as most conventional Western painting since the Renaissance has. Avery was often thought of as an American Matisse, especially because of his colorful and innovative landscape paintings. His poetic, bold and creative use of drawing and color set him apart from more conventional painting of his era. Early in his career, his work was considered too radical for being too abstract; when Abstract Expressionism became dominant his work was overlooked, as being too representational.

French Fauvism and German Expressionism influenced the style of Avery's early work, and his paintings from the 1930s are similar to those of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. By the 1940s, Avery's painting style had become more similar to Henri Matisse, and his later works use color with great subtlety. According to art historian Barbara Haskell, "serenity and harmony" characterized all of Avery's work, especially his late work, which, "more than ever, exuded a world of low-key emotions from which anger and anxiety were absent."

About Avery's art

According to painter Mark Rothko, <blockquote>What was Avery's repertoire? His living room, Central Park, his wife Sally, his daughter March, the beaches and mountains 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.</blockquote>

Art critic Hilton Kramer said, in his review of Grad's book with its sumptuous illustrations,<blockquote>He was, without question, our greatest colorist. ... Among his European contemporaries, only Matisse—to whose art he owed much, of course—produced a greater achievement in this respect.</blockquote>

Public collections

  • Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass.
  • Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.
  • Binghamton University Art Museum, New York
  • Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama
  • Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.
  • Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York City
  • Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
  • Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Mass.
  • Castellani Art Museum, Niagara Falls, New York
  • Cleveland Museum of Art
  • Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina
  • Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Ark.
  • Davistown Museum, Liberty, Maine
  • Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, WI
  • Maier Museum of Art, Randolph College, Lynchburg Va.
  • Maitland Art Center, Florida
  • Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, New York
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
  • Milwaukee Art Museum
  • Minneapolis Institute of Art
  • Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas
  • Montana Museum of Art and Culture, Missoula
  • Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  • Museum of Modern Art, New York City
  • National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
  • National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
  • National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
  • Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, N.Y.
  • New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut
  • New Jersey State Museum, Trenton
  • North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
  • Oklahoma City Museum of Art
  • Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
  • Philadelphia Museum of Art
  • Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
  • Portland Art Museum, Oregon
  • Reading Public Museum, Pennsylvania
  • San Antonio Art League Museum, Texas
  • San Diego Museum of Art, California
  • Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California
  • San Francisco Museum of Art, California
  • Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Neb,
  • Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
  • Tate Modern, London, England
  • University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington
  • Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, Nashville, Tennessee
  • Vero Beach Museum of Art, Florida
  • Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
  • Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.
  • Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
  • Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Penn.
  • Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, New York
  • Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut

Notes

References

  • Breeskin, Adelyn. Milton Avery. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1960.
  • Breeskin, Adelyn. Milton Avery. Washington: The National Collection of Fine Arts, 1969.
  • Chernow, Bert. Milton Avery: a singular vision: [exhibition], Center for the Fine Arts, Miami. Miami, Florida: Trustees of the Center for the Fine Arts Association. 1987.
  • Grad, Bonnie Lee. Milton Avery Monotypes. Princeton University Library, 1977.
  • Grad, Bonnie Lee. Milton Avery. Foreword by Sally Michel Avery. Royal Oak, Michigan: Strathcona, 1981.
  • Haskell, Barbara. Milton Avery: The Metaphysics of Color, Westchester, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art, 1994.
  • Haskell, Barbara. Milton Avery. New York: Harper & Row Publishers in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1982.
  • Hobbs, Robert (2007). Milton Avery. Hudson Hills Press. ,
  • Hobbs, Robert (2001). Milton Avery: The late paintings. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
  • Johnson, Una E. Milton Avery Prints and Drawings 1930-1960. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1966.
  • Kramer, Hilton. Milton Avery: Paintings 1930-1960. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1962.
  • Kramer, Hilton. Avery: Our Greatest Colorist. New York Times, April 12, 1981.
  • ART USA NOW Ed. by Lee Nordness;Vol.1, (The Viking Press, Inc., 1963.) pp.&nbsp;66–69
  • Wilkin, Karen, Milton Avery: Paintings of Canada.

Archives of American Art

  • Oral history interview with Sally Avery, 1982 Feb. 19
  • Oral history interview with Sally Michel Avery, 1967 Nov. 3
  • Milton Avery at Xavier Hufkens
  • Milton Avery Gallery
  • A finding aid to the Milton Avery Papers, 1926-1982, bulk 1950-1982 in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
  • Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College
  • Avery, Our Greatest Colorist; Hilton Kramer; New York Times; April 12, 1981
  • Coptic Art, Dikran Kelekian, and Milton Avery 2014 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Milton Avery 2021 exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
  • Milton Avery: The Figure Exhibition at Karma in New York City, November 6–December 20, 2025.