Morgan Martin
Head of Department
PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF LYNDA THOMAS
Lot 14
Milton Avery(1885-1965)The Rose 24 x 18 in. (61 x 45.7 cm.)
18 November 2021, 14:00 EST
New YorkSold for US$106,562.50 inc. premium
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Aaron Anderson
Specialist, Head of Sale
Milton Avery (1885-1965)
The Rose
signed and dated 'Milton Avery / 1944' (lower right)
oil on canvasboard
24 x 18 in. (61 x 45.7 cm.)
Painted in 1944.
signed and dated 'Milton Avery / 1944' (lower right)
oil on canvasboard
24 x 18 in. (61 x 45.7 cm.)
Painted in 1944.
Footnotes
Provenance
B. Shaeffer (possibly Bertha Schaefer [1895-1971]), New York, acquired from the artist, December 1944.
Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York.
Mr. and Mrs. Eugene J. Schwarz, New York.
The American Gallery, New York.
Private collection, New York.
Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the late owner.
Exhibited
Yonkers, New York, The Hudson River Museum, Art in Westchester from Private Collections, September 28-November 2, 1969, n.p., no. 86. (as Still Life)
This lot is accompanied by a letter from The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, New York.
In The Rose, Milton Avery beautifully explores tensions and harmony through the use of complementary and contrasting colors and shapes in his interpretation of a classic still life subject. Painted in 1944, The Rose resides in his most prolific year and is the product of a critical period in Avery's artistic evolution. Avery began to distance himself from graphic and extraneous details when depicting his subjects and opted for denser, more evenly modulated areas of flattened color contained within crisply defined forms. The visual contrast of colors and shapes found in The Rose appealed to Avery, as he places the highly saturated reds of the rose and greens of the sea outside the window against the more muted tones of the grey shapes that form the window and the black surface of the table. Color, as in his later works, remains the primary vehicle of expression and, while he has flattened his color into delineated abstracted recognizable forms, Avery has not entirely relinquished the desire to describe the individual parts of his subject. The small, thinly applied lines within the greens of the sea and the textured impasto of the rose, vines, and leaves reveals Avery was still in the midst of transitioning into his mature style. In The Rose, Avery masterfully evokes a tenderness for a familiar motif and celebrates our relationship with life's simple pleasures while still successfully concentrating on the painting's purely visual properties.
