Milton Avery

by Milton Avery (illustrator), Robert Carleton Hobbs

―The highly anticipated reprint of the artist's monograph that is still is considered the most comprehensive presentation of Avery's work ―Included are many unfamiliar pieces, in oversize color plates that range in date from the early 1920s to 1963 ―A detailed chronology of the artist's life is included and rounding out the volume are essays that explore Avery's career in detail, from the importance of Avery's wife Sally Michel, to the interaction-personal, artistic, and political-between him and his Abstract Expressionist colleagues Milton Avery chronicles the work of an artist who, although he did not become a serious, full-time painter until after he moved to New York at the age of 40, managed to carve out a unique position for himself in the art world over the next thirty-five years. A friend and colleague of the Abstract Expressionists who nevertheless maintained his commitment to representation, Avery was enormously important to several succeeding generations of artists and produced some of the most resonant and beloved images in American art history. Avery's work reflects the concerns he shared with the pioneer French modernists including Matisse, Dufy, and saturated color in distinctly new combinations and an interest in retaining the two-dimensional character of the canvas. The combination allowed him to create a distinctly American brand of modernism.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

264 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1981

About the author

The works of Henri Matisse influenced style of subtle colors and flat patterns of American painter Milton Clark Avery and abstract expressionism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_...

Reviews

[Kerfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

from an exhibition organized by the American Federation or Arts in 2001

Unlike those artists who explode in youth and then keep repeating their success, having nothing else new or substantial to say, Avery spent years looking, listening, thinking: not only at art and the world, but poetry, words, conversation. His late work was "a culmination of life events."

Like Clement Greenberg, I prefer his landscapes to his figures. The simplicity is deceptive; the combination of realism and abstraction is carefully balanced, the relationship subtle and complex. As Greenberg states: "No matter how much he simplifies or eliminates, he almost always preserves the local, namable identity of his subject; it never becomes merely a pretext."

I spent a lot of time looking at the reproductions of the paintings, enhanced by the essays, which were insightful, full of information about 20th century painting, and well-written. The influence of Albert Pinkham Ryder on Avery was not a connection I would have made on my own. Matisse is more direct; but the poetic bond of Mallarme-Matisse to Wallace Stevens-Avery was also something I would not have thought about.

Robert Hobbs, who wrote the main essays, points out that the artist is never "done": creative individuals must always begin again, learning and relearning, circling around the universal, the "first idea". Food for thought, and probably applicable to education and the art of living as well.

[Christy Draper]

Milton Avery is an American Modernist. I happened across this book a few months ago. I kept looking at it and then putting it back on the shelves. Last week I finally broke down and purchased it. It is a beautiful example of abstraction combined with representation. I'm only about a quarter of a way through this. More insight to come.