Milton Avery: The Legacy    Oct 10 - Nov 21, 2003

Milton Avery’s legacy bestowed on American contemporary art a strong endorsement of a more pure American view of modernist art, a view that had by nature some European influences, but was primarily based on American culture. At the time, American regionalism and impressionism were converging, but Europe still dominated with the Fauves and artists like Matisse and Picasso who were becoming more and more abstract. Avery’s quietly powerful direction of using local landscapes, friends, and family as starting points for the bold exploration of the abstract elements was truly unique. These elements mixed with the ultra sensitive eye of an American poet created an extremely influential body of work. This work bridged regionalism and modernism thereby paving the way for the emerging new contemporary. Marsden Hartley, Mark Rothko, Clement Greenberg, a diverse group indeed, would all concur that Milton Avery was indeed a poet of loveliness, a painter’s painter.

The works we selected for this exhibition are primarily works created in the late thirty’s and early forties. These works focus on Avery’s use of the abstract elements of line, color, and form, works that were the foundation for his minimalist abstractions of the fifties. The watercolors show energetic edges of color that so entranced Rothko, the drawings have that love of line becoming pattern that offers elegant structure to the softness of the masses of color, the compositions are open and clean like the space in which Avery worked. These works are truly a major part of his legacy and to see them together is to really feel the power of his poetry.