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Milton Avery

Milton Avery (1885-1965)
Offshore Island, 1958

46 by 56 inches
Oil on canvas
©Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska
Lincoln, Nebraska Art Association Collection – Thomas C. Woods Memorial 1960.N-125

    Milton Avery painted inimitably from the beginning of his career to the very end. Although the influences that affected his development can be seen without difficulty, there is throughout a basic simplicity of vision that is peculiarly his. First there was the Impressionism of Ernest Lawson and John Twachtman, then the figurative realism of the Art Students League, then the impact of Matisse and Picasso, and in each instance Avery made of these influences something that was unmistakably his, paintings in which style and color were primary elements. From the first, his idea of picture making was a matter of organizing visual experience. He has said, "I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea."1

    If we look at Offshore Island in such terms we can see at once the rightness of such a method. The canvas is divided into four bands of color that mark the progression of space from the horizon to the foreground at our feet. Superimposed like some ponderous amphibious monster on the upper darker bands of color, which are the sky and the sea, is the island. Against the distance and weight of these elements is counterpoised the foamy evanescence of the breaking surf and the velvety texture of the beach. All the areas of color, which are the sky, the sea, the island, and the beach, are firmly placed and almost opaque in quality, but the breaking surf, with its diffuse upper edge of blue has a transparency that reveals the tints of underpainted color.

    Avery is a master of the twentieth-century notion of a painting as a flat, two-dimensional object, and yet in his disposition of shapes and colors he achieves a simultaneous sense of space which is intrinsic to the work itself. Abstraction and representation have achieved a new kind of unity. Milton Avery never painted a pure abstraction, but it is of some interest to note that among his closest friends were Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman, and a considerable number of younger painters who have chosen to translate their experience abstractly on the strength of his example.

References: 1 Milton Avery quoted by Robert Warnick in "A Quiet American Painter Whose Art Is Now Being Heard," Smithsonian (October 1982): 113.

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