Milton Avery

(1885-1965)

Pale Trees – Dark Pool 24 x 36in

Footnotes

Provenance
The artist.
Mrs. Ruth Broder, New York, possibly acquired from the above, circa 1965.
Mr. Alan J. Broder, by descent.
Estate of the above.

One of the most celebrated modernist American painters, Milton Avery, was born in upstate New York in 1885 and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. The son of a tanner, Avery began his foray into blue collar work at the age of sixteen to support his family, holding jobs as a factory worker and file clerk. His premature interest in art would lead him to attend life drawing classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students when he was twenty years old. There, Avery received a traditional studio education that allowed him to develop his craft, first with a series of genre subjects and traditional realism, which would later influence his experiments with color and composition. With his first public exhibition in Hartford in 1915 under his belt, Avery went on to study at the School of Art Society in Hartford and then moved to New York City in the early 1920s in order to be closer to Sally Michel, who would later become his wife. Twenty years his junior, Michel attended the renowned Art Students League, where Avery would eventually practice. When they married in 1926, Michel's income as an illustrator allowed Avery to paint full time.

The 1920s saw Avery's work greatly influenced by American Impressionism with his use of color and subject matter. Yet only when he dove into the realm of abstraction, taking a cue from the Fauvist movement in Europe, did Avery start to achieve a unique look and feel to his pictures that would resonate for decades. Eliminating fussier details and representing his figures, interiors, landscapes and seascapes with strokes of flat yet distinct color, Avery became one of the first American artists to successfully mimic the emotion of his Continental counterparts and their symphonic compositions. In 1928, Avery exhibited alongside Mark Rothko in a group show at The Opportunity Gallery, which inspired a long and admirable friendship between the two artists who sought to change the field of modern art in America with their interpretations of color and abstraction. Rothko would become a champion of Avery's work, praising his every day sources of inspiration, while Avery solidified his influence over this new generation of painters.

Famously, Avery was a man of few words and his subtle yet expressive oeuvre does little to dispel that notion. The present lot, Pale Trees - Dark Pool is classic Avery at his most elementary and refined. Painted in 1950, this work represents the artist's continual inspiration from the natural world and his concern with color field painting. With its rustic palette of light grey, lime green and stone blue the work allows the viewer to focus on each individual block and space before resting along the horizon line of geometric tree branches. With a sincere and intellectual simplicity, Avery manages to communicate his surroundings with a few brush strokes in a limited range of colors, a hallmark of his compositions that would make him one of the most highly collectible and admired artists in contemporary American culture. The 1950s was a period of great simplicity for Avery, after mounting his first solo show at The Phipps Collection in Washington, D.C. in 1944 and later surviving a heart attack in 1949.

Avery and his work would come to be regarded as invaluable to the history and changing aesthetics of American art, bearing the brunt of fashion when deemed too representational for the Abstract Expressionists and having first been too radical for the portrait painters and traditionalists throughout his formal education. Yet with his surviving work we are able to feel the maturation of the American eye and appreciate the widespread popularity of genius when it invents a new language to see with. Avery's work is included in some of the most important permanent collections in the country, such as The Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and The Harvard University Art Museums, Boston, Massachusetts.