Milton Avery, 1885 - 1965

Milton Avery was described by fellow painter Mark Rothko as “a great poet-inventor who had invented sonorities never seen nor heard before…His is the poetry of sheer loveliness, of sheer beauty.” Avery was born in 1885 in Altmar, NY as the son of a tanner. For most of his life, he sustained his immediate and extended family through manual labor while he and his wife, Sally Michel Avery, a painter and illustrator in her own right, created modernist works in near obscurity. He sold his first painting to a museum in 1929, to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., which also gave him his first solo exhibition in 1944. In the 1930s, the Averys moved to New York City and formed friendships with other modernists such as Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb. Avery’s radiant colors and simplified forms influenced the abstract painters of the 1950s. Like his near contemporary, Georgia O’Keeffe, Avery became ever bolder in his later years, painting canvases up to six feet wide with an ever greater reduction in forms, approaching near total abstraction.