Milton Avery, born in 1885 in New York and passing away in 1965 in New York was a painter celebrated for his lyrical command of colour and form. Often referred to as the ‘American Fauve’, Avery occupies a singular position in 20th-century American art, bridging the sensibilities of Impressionism, Modernism and the emergent language of Abstract Expressionism, while remaining aligned with none. Spending much of his life in rural settings and coastal retreats, Avery was drawn to the ephemeral qualities of light, which he translated into luminous, flattened compositions that evoke a sense of quiet immediacy. His subjects – landscapes, seascapes, domestic interiors and everyday scenes – are rendered with a restrained yet radiant palette, and a distilled formal economy that lends them an intimate, contemplative resonance. His work resists spectacle in favour of nuance, offering a vision of the world that is at once modest and profoundly attuned to the poetics of the ordinary.
Although successful in his lifetime and friends with some of the leading artists of his era (including Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman) Avery was only honoured with a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1962, when he was seventy-seven years old. During his lifetime, Avery had institutional solo exhibitions at Phillips Memorial Gallery (now Phillips Collection), Washington, DC (1943); Portland Art Museum, Oregon (1947); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1952); Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California (1956); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1960); and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (1964), among others. Other institutional solo exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art, New York (1965); National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution (1969); Brooklyn Museum (1970); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1973); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1980); Whitney Museum of American Art (1982); Milwaukee Art Museum (2001); and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2021). His work is represented in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tate, London; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum of Art, Madrid, Spain; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.