Questroyal 2009

Milton Avery ( 1885 – 1965 ) Plate 1 Bather, 1952 Gouache and watercolor on paper 29 1 / 4 x 21 inches (sight size) Signed and dated lower right: Milton Avery 1952 provenance Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles Private collection, Montecito, California Private collection, by descent exhibited Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California, RecentWatercolors by Milton Avery Courtesy of the Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, June 5 –July 8, 1956 This conviction of greatness, the feeling that one was in the presence of great events, was immediate on encountering [Avery’s] work. . . . 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 canvas to the very last touch of the brush. For Avery was a great poet-inventor who invented sonorities never seen or heard before. mark rothko, artist, 1965 1 Avery has the finest eye for color in the entire history of American painting. hilton kramer, art critic, 1982 2 Design Stripped Bare Milton Avery was a singular yet highly influential figure in modern Ameri- can art. He developed a unique vision, adopting the philosophy that every painting should be begun as if it were the first. 3 This desire to approach each new subject with a freshness of vision is best articulated in his mature work. Inspired by Henri Matisse, Avery pushed his formal experiments to a new level, seeking pure, unmediated expression through color and form. As his technique evolved, his images became increasingly abstract and compressed. Avery embraced visual instability, prompting the viewer to acknowledge the paradox of painting, a practice that presents the illusion of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional picture plane. Avery’s works, such as Bather , playfully acknowledge this contradiction, simultaneously suggesting and denying space. While form is built up through interlocking shapes of different hues, it is also undermined, as figure and setting seem to hover at the surface of the visual field. Refusing entrenched methods such as chiaroscuro and linear perspective, the artist favored subtle variations of line and a limited color palette with a range of hues. Avery exploited the flexibility of watercolor as a medium, varying the thickness of paint and facture from dry dabs to liquid, diaphanous layers. Form and color, however, remained in service of the idea. According to the artist, “Today I design a canvas very carefully before I begin to paint it. The two-dimensional design is important, but not so important as the design in depth. I do not use linear perspective, but achieve depth by color—the function of one color within another. I strip the design of essentials: the facts do not interest me as much as the essence of nature.” 4 For Avery, color served a dual purpose: it was both a technical tool to define space and abandon the artificiality of engrained artistic techniques, and a carefully honed expressive device. — imh Avery’s works are featured in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Portrait Gallery, Phillips Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Cleveland Art Museum. 1 Mark Rothko, “Commemorative Essay,” memorial address delivered at the NewYork Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West Sixty-fourth Street, January 7, 1965 . 2 Hilton Kramer, The NewYork Times Magazine , August 29, 1982 . 3 Milton Avery, quoted in Dore Ashton, “Milton Avery,” Milton Avery: Avery in Mexico and After , exh. cat. (NewYork: Rapoport Print. Corp. , 1981 ), p. 16 . 4 Ibid.