Milton Avery

(1885-1965)

Bird Over Sea 28 x 22 1/8 in. (71.1 x 56.2 cm.)

Footnotes

Provenance
William Zierler, Inc., New York.
Elizabeth Evans (née Hughes) Gossett (1907-1981), Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
By descent from the above to the late owner, daughter of the above, 1981.

This lot is accompanied by a letter from The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, New York.

Bird Over Sea is an excellent example of Milton Avery's maturing style of the 1950s and 1960s and a tender image of the familiar and ordinary that Avery found comfort in as he neared death. At this stage in his career, Avery's pictorial focus shifted from describing the individual parts of his subjects to instead focusing on a harmony among the composition's elements. Avery began exploring ways to create compositional harmony through the simplification of shape and reduction of detail as early as 1944, but by the 1950s and onward, he mastered this vision that allowed him to achieve balance and to better express more universal qualities of experience. His mature painting technique incorporated large thin washes of paint, sometimes one over the other, to create textural, veiled strokes of color. In the present work, Avery has deconstructed the land, sea, sky, clouds, and bird so they serve as simplified abstract forms and as referential objects.

Avery's inspiration for Bird Over Sea likely stems from his summers of 1957 through 1960 spent in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Reflecting on these summers, Avery remarked, "I have always been drawn to the sea. After a number of summers spent inland, I came to Provincetown - to a little house on the bay. Birds and sea surrounded me and many wonderful hours were spent just watching." (as quoted in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, College of Fine and Applied Arts, Contemporary American Paintings and Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, Champaign, Illinois, 1959, p. 192) Though he remained in New York during the summer when the present work was painted, due to his deteriorating health, his memory of the beaches and wildlife of Provincetown stayed with him.

In the final years of his life, Avery introduced new themes in his works that likely reflect his growing awareness of death and the fleeting nature of time. One of these motifs was the image of a lone bird soaring above the ocean, such as in Birds Over Sea (1957, Private collection) and Flight (1959, Collection of Maurice and Margo Cohen), which is an image often associated with the soul leaving this world after death and freedom from the physical restraints of the natural world. By 1960, Avery shifted his focus from depicting the bird in mid flight to one descending toward earth, as shown in Plunging Gull (1960, Collection of Maurice and Margo Cohen) and in the present work from 1961. The way in which Avery depicts his birds is inspired by his fascination with folk art that found its way in to his work as early as the 1930s. As evident in the present work, the flattened nature of the facial features of the bird and the abbreviated configuration of its tail feathers resemble early American decoys. (R. Hobbs, H. Kramer, Milton Avery, New York, 1990, p. 83)

Avery masterfully evokes a tenderness for the familiar and celebrates the beauty of life itself in Bird Over Sea. In Avery's final years, he continued to paint as long as he could, living by his own credo to "keep painting - day in, day out. Be absorbed by it. Hold on to the dream - try to make the great dream a reality." (as quoted in Contemporary American Paintings and Sculpture, 1959, p. 192) The rising generation of American color painters would look toward Avery's achievements with admiration and for inspiration, making his work eternal. Avery's color harmonies and motifs that he explored in the final years of his artistic career remain endearing and captivating.