Noticing lxxxix - Milton Avery, artist

A Facebook friend of mine posts random images by random artists, and one today caught my eye, both for its visual interest and for the artist's name: Milton Avery.

Blue Moon (1954)

I recognized the name, but I wasn't sure I'd ever spent much time exploring his imagery. So this evening I did. And here's what I found out.

Avery (1885–1965) was the son of a tanner, and began working at a local factory at age 16. He supported himself for decades with a succession of blue-collar jobs. In 1915, his brother-in-law died, leaving Avery as the sole support of nine female relatives. At about the same time, he started taking art classes, soon shifting to working night jobs so that he could paint in the daytime. In 1926, he married an illustrator, Sally Michel, whose work brought in enough to allow him to devote himself to painting full time. He soon found a patron in Roy Neuberger, who bought over a hundred of his paintings, beginning with Gaspé Landscape: 

Gaspé Landscape (1938)

He also found supporters in abstract expressionists Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, though Avery himself didn't fall into the abstract expressionist category but occupied a space of his own. Rothko described him thus:

What was Avery's repertoire? His living room, Central Park, his wife Sally, his daughter March, the beaches and mountains where they summered; cows, fish heads, the flight of birds; his friends and whatever world strayed through his studio: a domestic, unheroic cast. But from these there have been fashioned great canvases, that far from the casual and transitory implications of the subjects, have always a gripping lyricism, and often achieve the permanence and monumentality of Egypt.

He was, above all, a colorist, his work bearing some resemblance to Kirchner and Matisse. Here are some of his paintings (which, by the way, sell for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, on the rare occasion that they find their way into an auction house):

Untitled (Harbor Scene) (1921)

Man Fishing (1938

Vermont Landscape (1941)

Bucolic Landscape (1942)

Cello Player in Blue (1944)

Still Life with Bottles (1944)

Swimmers and Sunbathers (1945)

White Umbrellas (1952)

Red Nude (1954)

Reflections (1954)

Dune and Bushes (1958)

Beach Blankets (1960)

Morning Sky (1962)

Dark Inlet (1963)