Milton Avery: The Late Paintings
Milwaukee Art Museum
November 30, 2001 - January 27, 2002
The first survey to explore the late paintings of one of the most influential American modernists, Milton Avery: The Late Paintings premieres at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Along with Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, the Milwaukee Art Museum exhibits Wisconsin Collects Avery. This exhibition contains MAM’s Avery artworks, as well as works from Wisconsin institutions and private collections.
Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, organized by the American Federations of Arts and supported by the National Patrons of the AFA, comprises more than 50 exemplary paintings produced in the last two decades of Milton Avery’s life (1885–1965). The works feature nudes, interiors, seascapes, landscapes and Avery’s eloquent Self-Portrait (1947), depicting the artist with brush in hand surrounded by his own paintings. The paintings were executed between 1947, when Milton Avery had his first gallery retrospective, My Daughter, March (a survey of his own art and a celebration of his daughter’s life), and 1963, when he was forced to stop painting due to poor health.
During his lifetime, Milton Avery combined aspects of Impressionist subject matter with Abstract Expressionism, American interest in the everyday and Abstract Expressionist color and handling, effectively uniting American traditions and modernism. He is celebrated for his bold experiments with color and his spare, graceful style. In the 1950s and early 60s, Milton Avery intensified the contradictions between representation and abstraction in increasingly larger canvases, some measuring as much as five by six feet, and explored extreme simplification of forms.
“Avery’s common subjects and simple forms invite viewers to take the images at face value, but upon careful examination, his paintings reflect a powerful play between realism and abstraction,” said Russell Bowman, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum and curator of the exhibition at the Museum. “They also have a wit and vitality that make them wonderfully accessible.”
Frequently considered the last of the American painterly figurative artists, Milton Avery is reassessed in this survey as a pioneer and forerunner of a new generation of artists. He had an enduring influence on mid-century American art and was an inspiration to younger Abstract Expressionists such as Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, both life-long friends of Avery. In Avery’s eulogy, Mark Rothko acknowledged the debt that he and others owed, “For Avery was a great poet inventor who invented sonorities never seen nor heard before. From these we have learned much and will learn more for a long time to come.”
Wisconsin Collects Avery
The exhibition Milton Avery: The Late Paintings allows the Milwaukee Art Museum to highlight its own Avery collection and the acquisition of Milton Avery works among Wisconsin collectors. The Museum owns seven Avery paintings, which are displayed as part of its Bradley Collection. Collecting of Avery’s work in Milwaukee was led by art patron Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley’s special interest in the artist combined with the David Barnett Gallery’s numerous exhibitions of works from the Avery estate in the 1980s and 90s. Comprised of more than 30 works, Wisconsin Collects Avery includes paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints; and reflects the full range of works produced during the artist’s career.
After the presentation in Milwaukee, Milton Avery: The Late Paintings travels to the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, where it is on view from February 16 through April 14, 2002.
PUBLICATION: A fully illustrated catalogue published by the American Federation of Arts and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., accompanies the exhibition. Milton Avery: The Late Paintings features an extensive essay by Robert Hobbs, examining the philosophical underpinnings of Avery’s style and the ways in which modernist themes culminate in his late work. It also appraises the role that Avery played in the formation of the Color Field painters of Abstract Expressionism. A seminal essay on Milton Avery by Clement Greenberg that originally appeared in the December 1957 issue of Arts Magazine, and was later revised by the author, is reprinted. The renowned critic placed Avery in the vanguard of a tradition that united abstraction and representation, applying American ingenuity and an international sensibility. More than 110 pages containing approximately 52 colorplates and 35 black-and-white illustrations. 10 x 10 inches. Paperbound; $25.
MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM - MAM
700 N. Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, WI 53202
