Milton Avery 1885-1965

Private Collection, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, circa 1990

Please see attached condition report from Terrence Mahon.
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The nineteen forties was a highly productive decade for Milton Avery with the representation of a new dealer, Paul Rosenberg, fueling a particularly creative period bolstering his confidence with new sales and critical attention. After Avery's inaugural show at Paul Rosenberg & Co. in 1943, his work was the subject of a one-man exhibition in 1944 at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D.C. and in January of 1945 both Rosenberg and Durand-Ruel held simultaneous shows in their Fifty-seventh street galleries. Inspired and encouraged, Avery's style progressed throughout the forties. By the end of the decade, it had significantly evolved. 

Canvases from the late forties are distinguished by Avery's purposefully refined use of color and shape in pursuit of a new, pared down composition. He slowly began moving away from the influences of Matisse and the European artists who had informed his work throughout the first half of the decade. Interested now in opening up the space within his composition, Avery achieved this new sparseness by reducing the number of objects in his compositions and narrowly modulating the palette. He methodically placed simplified elements within the composition against backgrounds of modified color. The overall effect gave shape equal importance to color and heralded Avery's next decade of work.

In 1951, Avery left Paul Rosenberg & Company and joined the newly formed Grace Borgenicht Gallery.  Instead of being the sole American painter in a roster of European artists, Avery enjoyed the camaraderie of a gallery devoted to the promotion of American art.  But while he was later credited with influencing American Post-War painters such as Rothko and Gottlieb, he never felt completely part of the American Abstract movement. Importantly, Avery was unwilling to give up figurative elements or a chosen subject. He wrote in 1951, "I am not seeking pure abstraction; rather the purity and essence of the idea—expressed in its simplest form" (Robert Hobbs, Milton Avery, 1990, p. 166). Throughout the decade, he worked on maintaining the emotional impact of the subject within an increasingly pared down composition. "I work on two levels.  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" (Milton Avery, 1990, p. 172). 

Avery selected the subjects of his paintings from his personal life and immediate surroundings. He often depicted his small, close-knit family; his wife Sally and their daughter March, engrossed in quiet activities such as reading or sunbathing. The Averys spent the summer of 1951 in Woodstock, New York where Avery painted Poetry After Breakfast, an intimate scene of the family gathered around a breakfast table strewn with all the accoutrements of a leisurely morning meal. It is a summertime setting on a screened-in porch, the lush green landscape of the Woodstock woods visible through the wide windows behind them. Two seated figures, Sally and a guest, sit with their chairs pushed back from the table, listening to March as she reads aloud while reclining on a banquette. The tilted perspective of the floor, reduced forms and modulated palette flatten the pictorial plane. The cool blue-gray tone of the table and chairs relates closely in value to the pale gray wash of the floor which dominates the background of two thirds of the composition. The color, applied in several layers of pigment which Avery then blended together, is luminous. The color relationships of the various elements are close, instead of the typical dark and light contrasts cuing the depth of visual space, the use of diagonal lines and overlapping planes create the dramatic perspective. Using bright color as detail, such as Sally's red dress and a burgundy pillow behind March's head, Avery accents the left and right quadrant of the painting respectively. Hans Hofmann noted, "Avery was one of the first to understand color as a creative means. He was one of the first to relate colors in a plastic way" (Hans Hofmann interview with Frederick S. Wight, 1952).

At Avery's memorial service in 1965, Mark Rothko famously remarked: "There have been several others in our generation who have celebrated the world around them, but none with that inevitability where the poetry penetrated every pore of the canvas to the very last touch of the brush. For Avery was a great poet-inventor who had invented sonorities never seen or heard before. From these we have learned much and will learn more for a long time to come."