Milton Avery (1885-1965)

 

Milton Avery spent 50 years of his life painting -- in some cases all day for weeks at a time, sometimes creating as many as 5 or 6 paintings or studies in one day.  As early as 1905, Milton began attending the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford where he studied drawing and painting.  Milton Avery's roots lie in the conjunction of American regionalism and European and American impressionism.  While Avery began as a relatively traditional painter in the 1920s, his style quickly ran counter to the social realism of the time.  He combined elements of American impressionism with the simplified shapes of Matisse to forge a unique style that became increasingly abstract later in his career. His early landscapes and seascapes exhibit the light palette, atmospheric mistiness, and heavy impasto of the American Impressionist School. After moving to New York in 1925, Avery was introduced to the work of Matisse and Picasso, both of whose works inspired the artist to simplify his forms into broad areas of close-valued color. Avery’s art became increasingly abstract, but as is evidenced by his mature paintings of the mid-1940’s and later, he never abandoned representational subject.

 

Exhibitions:  

 

 2002                Milton Avery - The Late Paintings, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA

 1999                Color & Field, American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich

 1989                Milton Avery: Paintings and Watercolors, Mexican Series: 1946-1947, Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ

 1988                Milton Avery: Progressive Images, Bosie Art Museum, Boise, ID

 1987                Milton Avery: A Singular Vision, Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, FL

 1982                Milton Avery: Major Works, Boca Raton Center for the Art, Boca Raton, FL

 1982                American Prints: Process and Proofs, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

 1981                Milton Avery: Works on paper, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Fransisco, CA

 1980                The Painterly Print: Monotypes from the Seventeeth to the Twentieth Century, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

 1978                The Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta

 1977                Print Aquisitions, The Musuem of Modern Art, New York, NY

 1971                Ways of Looking, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

 1971                Milton Avery: Late Paintings, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA

 1964                Paintings by Milton Avery, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT

  1961               Shore Galleries, Boston, MA

 1958                Milton Avery: Oils and Watercolors, Otto Seligman Gallery, Seattle, WA

 1953                The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD

 1952                The Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

 1947                My Daughter March, Durand-Ruel Galleries, New York, NY

 1946                Advancing American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

 1944                Watercolors by Milton Avery, Phillips Memorial Gallery, Washington, DC

 1940                20th Century Figure Paintings, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR

 1933                Milton Avery: Recent Watercolors, Gallery 144, New York, NY

 1930                Paintings: Milton Avery, Clara Lee Cousins, Morton Galleries, New York, NY

 1928                Opportunity Gallery, New York, NY

 1924                Old Gate Studio, Hartford, CT

 

Collections:

 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC              Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, UK

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa                     Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel

Museo Thyssen – Bornemisza, Madrid                Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Pheonix Art Museum, Pheonix, Arizona               Whitney Museum of American Art, New York