The Quiet Man

Milton Avery created a unique blend of figuration, abstraction, and color wizardry that influenced generations of artists who came after him.

By John Dorfman

Milton Avery (1885–1965) was a man of few words. He would go whole days without saying anything, until his wife, the painter Sally Michel Avery, would finally get him to speak. The couple liked to entertain fellow artists in their  New York apartment, and during these gatherings, Avery would sit silent until finally letting drop a remark that showed he’d been paying close and thoughtful attention all along. By way of explanation for his quietness, he said, “Why talk when you can paint?”

Blossoming, 1918, oil on board, 11 x 15 in.
Milton Avery Trust. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

And his paintings are eloquent indeed. Avery developed a visual language all his own, in which passages of color, rather than perspective, convey the sense of space and depth. His paintings, while always figurative, became increasingly abstract over the course of his career as he radically simplified his forms and reduced line work to a minimum. In Avery’s late work, generally accepted as his greatest, it seems as if various colored shapes happen to coalesce gracefully to form a picture. In keeping with the artist’s quiet nature, his paintings are contemplative and poetic rather than dramatic or intense, and yet they have a quality that Avery, in one of a rare moment of verbal self-disclosure, characterized as ecstatic. In 1951 he said, “I like to seize one sharp instant in nature, imprison it by means of ordered shapes and space relationships to convey the ecstasy of the moment. To this end I eliminate and simplify, leaving nothing but color and pattern. But with these I attempt to build an organic whole—a canvas which will stand independently.”

In general, though, Avery preferred his art to do the talking, and in keeping with that principle, he resisted art-critical attempts to analyze his methods and trace his influences. His art has often been compared to that of Matisse, because of similarities in their approach to color, but he always denied that he had been influenced by the French modernist master. Avery was hardly self-taught, having studied in small art schools in New England as well as at the Art Students League in New York, but he rarely alluded to any teachers. This wasn’t arrogance, though; he simply believed that personal details were extraneous to his art and therefore unimportant.

Coney Island, 1931, oil on canvas, 32 x 40 in.
The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

An opportunity to assess Avery’s contribution is now available, courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn. Titled simply “Milton Avery,” the exhibition is the first complete career retrospective of the artist in 30 years and brings together 60 works including scenes of daily life, portraits of loved ones, and landscapes, culminating in a selection of innovative large-scale near-abstractions from his last great creative period in the 1950s and early ’60s. The exhibition, which was previously on view in Fort Worth, will be at the Wadsworth from March 5–June 5 before finishing at the Royal Academy. The Wadsworth iteration constitutes a homecoming for the artist, who grew up in the Hartford area and began his art career in Connecticut.

Born in 1885 in upstate New York, he moved with his parents to East Hartford when still a child and endured a hard working-class upbringing. Manual labor was a way of life in the Avery family. At the age of 16, Milton Avery went to work at the Hartford Machine and Screw Company as an aligner, later moving up to assembler. Three years later, he got a job at the Underwood Manufacturing Company, where he spent six years as a lathe operator and mechanic. It was during this time that he discovered art, via an advertisement for courses in commercial lettering. Believing that there was more money to be made in lettering, Avery enrolled in the Connecticut League of Art Students, a free night school in Hartford. At the advice of a teacher there, he transferred to the life-drawing class. He continued to study at the League until 1918. In 1915, Avery exhibited a painting for the first time, at the annual show of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts; however, he was financially unable to devote himself full-time to painting and took a desk job at the Travelers Insurance Companies, working the night shift so he could spend the days painting outdoors. Avery’s path to a viable art career was a slow one, due in large part to financial pressures. During the early ’20s he returned to working full-time at manual jobs, including for a tire and rubber company and on construction sites.

Little Fox River, 1942, oil on canvas, 36.125 x 48.125 in.
Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1969.01.07. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jim Frank

Meanwhile, he was spending summers painting en plein air in Gloucester, Mass., as part of an art colony. It was there, in 1924, that he met Sally Michel, a woman from New York City 17 years his junior. The following year, he moved to New York to be with her, and they soon married. Their union would be a lifelong, mutually supportive one, in which both partners were creative and passed that spirit on to their daughter, March, who was born in 1932 and is still active as an artist today. Her work follows in her parents’ tradition of abstracted figuration and use of color, to the point that art historians are beginning to refer to the “Avery style.”

Despite all his years of hard work on painting during the ’10s and ’20s, it was only after he settled in New York, at the age of 41, that Avery started to get recognition as an artist and to craft the mature style that he is known for. The painting he had done in Connecticut was strongly influenced by the American Impressionist movement, especially (though indirectly) by John Henry Twachtman and Ernest Lawson. Works in the Wadsworth’s exhibition such as Blossoming (1918), a high-impasto study of springtime trees putting forth white flowers against a greenish-blue sky, demonstrate not only a mastery of impressionist style but a deep affinity with nature that even decades spent amid the concrete of New York could not extinguish. However, Avery’s first efforts in New York were, not unexpectedly, in a darker palette than he had been accustomed to using, and he reveled in the grit of the city and closely observed its folkways. His Studio View (Chop Suey) from sometime in the 1930s, is a glimpse through parted curtains out a window and past a set of elevated train tracks at a Chinese restaurant. Avery loved the spectacle of Coney Island’s amusement parks and crowds and painted them often, with a rich sense of humor. There is a touch of Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas in these circus and nightlife paintings of Avery’s early days in New York.

Milton Avery, Boathouse by the Sea, 1959, oil on canvas, 72 x 60 in.
Milton Avery Trust. © 2021 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Victoria Miro and Waqas Wajahat

While Sally worked as an illustrator for the New York Times and Macy’s department store, Milton took classes at the Art Students League and tried to sell his paintings. Finally, in 1928, he got his first solo show in the city, at the Frank Rehn Gallery, and soon thereafter, was invited to exhibit at the non-profit Opportunity Gallery. Through that gallery, he met Mark Rothko, who became a lifelong friend, and through Rothko, he became friends with Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb. These younger artists, who would later become pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, looked up to the older Avery, whom Gottlieb described as “a brilliant colorist and draftsman, a solitary figure working against the stream.” Though solitary in the sense that he belonged to no school and charted his own path, Avery was an influential artist who built a bridge between late-19th-century American Impressionism and mid-20th-century Abstract Expressionism. In fact, in his own body of work he spanned both styles, or, one might say, revealed what they had in common.

Avery’s career took a leap forward in 1935 when he gained representation from the Valentine Gallery, a prestigious dealer that also handled major European modernists including Picasso and Matisse. He stayed with Valentine until 1943, when he switched to Paul Rosenberg & Co. Simultaneously with Rosenberg, he also exhibited with the Paris-based Durand-Ruel Galleries. As these names indicate, Avery had definitely arrived in the mainstream of international modernism. He befriended European artists such as the Russians David Burliuk and John D. Graham (also a critic who supported Avery’s work) and the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp, whom he reportedly taught to shoot pool.

It was in the mid-1940s that Avery made a major breakthrough in his art: He thinned out his paint and started to let broad swaths of color do the work as the major compositional elements. His forms took a huge leap toward simplification. He continued to spend summers outside the city, especially in Gloucester but also elsewhere in New England and beyond, immersing himself in nature, his perennial source of inspiration, often in the company of Rothko and Gottlieb. His Little Fox River (1942) and Blue Trees (1945) exemplify this new, open style, in which figurative painting approaches abstraction without fully adopting it. The leaves against the hills, the beach against the sea, are felt as shapes and colors even before they are fully understood as elements of a landscape. Avery’s portraits from this period, such as Seated Girl With Dog (1945), minimize or eliminate facial features and reduce the sitter to a collection of colored shapes, more or less illuminated or shaded.

Seated Girl with Dog, 1944, oil on canvas, 44 x 32 in.
Collection Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. Gift from the Estate of Roy R. Neuberger, EL 02.2011.10. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jim Frank

Ever the late bloomer, Avery got his first museum retrospective in 1952, when he was 67 years old, at the Baltimore Museum of Art. But he was far from finished growing as an artist. In 1957 he made the last leap of his creative life, when he and Sally started spending summers in Provincetown, Mass., on Cape Cod. Here, in the presence of sea, sand, and a magical light that has attracted generations of painters and photographers, Avery expanded his canvas size to as much as six feet wide and took his abstraction process even farther, to the point where his paintings can be experienced without reference to the original scene. Sea Grasses and Blue Sea (1958) places passages of different blues against each other, with only some small black patches within the central one to suggest waves, while Boathouse by the Sea (1959) consists solely of bands of orange, pale blue, yellow, and black, leaving it to the viewer to decide where exactly the boathouse begins and the sea ends. Clement Greenberg, the champion of AbEx and a critic who had earlier dismissed Avery’s work, was impressed enough by these Provincetown works to write, “There is the sublime lightness of Avery’s hand on the one side and the morality of the eye on the other: the exact loyalty of these eyes to what they experience.” And speaking of his favorite artists, he wrote, “The latest generation of abstract painters in New York has certain salutary lessons to learn from him that they cannot learn from any other artist on the scene.”

Avery, working hard despite heart trouble, had only a few more years to live. He completed his last painting, Hills and Sunset Sky, on March 5, 1964, and the very next day was taken to Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, where he remained for the rest of the year. He died on January 3, 1965, at the age of 79. His final works, experimental and radical as they were, in some ways hearkened back to the earliest paintings, in which Avery set the pattern of relying on nature as his basic inspiration.  His whole artistic life was a quest for, as he himself put it, “the essence of nature.”