Milton Avery 1885 - 1965

Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London
James Maroney, New York
Marion and Gustave Ring, Washington, D.C.
Estate of Marion Ring
Planned Parenthood Federation of America (and sold: Sotheby's, New York, December 3, 1987, lot 347)
Acquired at the above sale by A. Alfred Taubman

Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Selections from the Collection of Marion and Gustave Ring, October 1985 - January 1986, no. 1, illustrated in color in the catalogue

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Painted in 1945, Blue Figure – Blue Sea dates to a significant transitional period in Milton Avery’s career, during which color became his primary means of expression and he sought to reduce figures and landscapes to their simplest forms. It was during this time that, according to the artist’s wife, Sally, “his spirits soared and his paintings blossomed. His color became clearer, sharper, and higher keyed, his shapes more stark and hard edged (Thomas Gibson Fine Art, Milton Avery: Figures from the Forties, London, 1981, p. 9). This dramatic change in his style can be largely attributed to Avery’s professional affiliation with the French art dealer Paul Rosenberg, which began when he joined Rosenberg’s New York gallery in 1942. Rosenberg facilitated Avery’s creative experimentation by exposing him to the work of the modern European artists he also represented, including Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, who arguably influenced Avery most directly. He studied the Spanish master deeply during this period, observing how Picasso simplified color and form and incorporating this reductive style into his own pictures.

Avery’s oeuvre is dominated by two major themes–portrayals of the human figure and images of the sea–both of which are illustrated in the present work. In Blue Figure – Blue Sea, Avery is set in a property in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Avery rented a house for the summer of 1945 with Sally and their daughter, March. He renders this same porch in several other compositions, each time interpreting each compositional component as a single area of brightly saturated color. This technique, compounded with Avery's reduction of extraneous details and the slanted perspective he employs, limits the sense of depth within the picture plane, thus ultimately reinventing a figurative, domestic scene as a two-dimensional design of color and pattern. While Avery never fully abandoned his commitment to representation, in works like Blue Figure – Blue Sea he does not seek to capture the subject faithfully. Avery’s intent to interpret the representational world through color and form earned him a reputation as among the earliest American practitioners of chromatic abstraction. He is considered today an important precursor to such iconic painters as Richard Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko and the proponents of the Color Field movement, who would go on to push his experiments with the expressive power and structural function of color fully into the nonobjective.