Background
Milton Avery was born on March 7, 1885 in Altmar, New York, United States and grew up in Connecticut, United States. Son of Russel Eugene, a tanner, and Esther (March) Avery.
Milton Avery was born on March 7, 1885 in Altmar, New York, United States and grew up in Connecticut, United States. Son of Russel Eugene, a tanner, and Esther (March) Avery.
His interest in art led him to attend classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford between 1905 and 1911, and over a period of years, Avery painted in obscurity while receiving a conservative art education. In 1918, he entered Hartford's School of the Art Society. Then he moved to New York City in 1925, and studied at the New York Art Students League from 1926 to 1938.
Milton Avery began working night jobs in 1917 in order to paint in the daytime. At that time he also exhibited his works. In the 1930s, he befriended Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko among many other artists living in New York City in the 1930s-40s.
Beginning in 1935 Avery exhibited with some of the top galleries in New York, and by 1943 when he began showing with Paul Rosenberg, his career was in full swing. Besiedes, in 1938 Avery worked as an artist in the Easel Division of the WPA Federal Art Project. His first solo exhibition was at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC in 1944. About 1949, Avery began to experiment with monotypes.
Avery often went to Gloucester, Massachusetts or places in Vermont, and occasionally Rothko and Gottlieb visited Avery during these New York absences. These coastal sojourns proved fertile inspiration for some of Avery's most accomplished paintings. Unfortunately Avery suffered a massive heart attack in 1949 and never fully recovered.
As the 1950s dawned, Avery's reputation amongst the New York art world diminished. In 1952 he visited Europe and began working in woodcut. By 1957, his paintings had become much larger in scale. Among the many places that exhibited Avery's work were the Phillips Memorial Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York. He spent the summers of 1957-1960 in Provincetown, Massachussets, the scene of many of his paintings.
Avery spent the last few years of his life in Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, New York after suffering a second heart attack. He died there in his sleep on January 3, 1965 in New York, United States. He is buried in the Artist's Cemetery in Woodstock, Ulster County, New York.
Female Painter
Offshore Island
Two Women
Sheep
Blue Bay and Dunes
Woman with a Hat
White Moon
Black Sea
Reclining Reader
Figure by Pool
Self-Portrait
Breaking Sea
Blue Nude
Oregon Coast
Autumn
Sketchers by the Stream
Bicycle Rider by the Loire
Adolescence
Advancing Sea
Green Chair
Checker Players
Birds Over Sky
Green Sea
White Wave
Shapes of Spring
Sea Grasses and Blue Sea
Robed Nude
Conversation
Onrushing Wave
Cello Player
Poetry Reading
Bucolic Landscape
Nude Combing Hair
Sally Avery with Still Life
Gaspe Pink Sky
Two Figures at Desk
Sail
Sketching by the Sea
Interlude
Bridge to the Sea
Sally
Artist's Wife
Green Sea
Vermont Hills
Quotations: "I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter."
In 1924 Milton Avery became a member of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts. He was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963. He was also a member and president of the Federation of Modern Painting and Sculpture.
Quotes from others about the person
Mark Rothko: "What was Avery's repertoire? His living room, Central Park, his wife Sally, his daughter March, the beaches and mountains where they summered; cows, fish heads, the flight of birds; his friends and whatever world strayed through his studio: a domestic, unheroic cast. But from these there have been fashioned great canvases, that far from the casual and transitory implications of the subjects, have always a gripping lyricism, and often achieve the permanence and monumentality of Egypt."
Hilton Kramer: "He was, without question, our greatest colorist. Among his European contemporaries, only Matisse - to whose art he owed much, of course - produced a greater achievement in this respect."
In 1924, Milton Avery met Sally Michel, a young art student, and in 1926, they married. At the beginning of their marriage, Sally Avery determined to place her own artistic concerns second to those of her husband, and she worked as a freelance illustrator to free Avery from the need to support his family. The two had a daughter, March Avery, in 1932.