Milton Avery, 1930s

Milton Avery: A Beginner’s Guide

Best known for his tranquil mid-century landscapes and still lifes, Milton Avery (1885–1965) is now being rediscovered for the very aspects that once eluded a critical canon obsessed with abstraction or social realism.

In the softly radiant painting Husband and Wife, Milton Avery invites us into an intimate Greenwich Village evening. A man sits in an armchair, face glowing orange with the heat of his own opinion, while his wife, folded in teals and blues, recedes into a mustard-yellow sofa, arms crossed in quiet distance. There is barely a line drawn – just light, shape, and colour.
But everything is there: character, emotion, time, and place – colour is the voice, which is why Avery remains a singular force in American art, yet tender, radical, and timeless.
Best known for his tranquil mid-century landscapes and still lifes, Avery (1885–1965) is now being rediscovered for the very aspects that once eluded a critical canon obsessed with abstraction or social realism.
Milton Avery, 1944. The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation – Consuelo Kanaga

A working-class start

Born in Altmar, New York, in 1885, Avery was the youngest of four in a working-class family. After moving to Hartford in 1898, he left school at 16 to work in factories – assembling typewriters and machining – as his family faced economic strain following his father’s death in 1905.

Night-school painter

To support relatives, Avery juggled daytime factory jobs and evening art classes. Between 1905‑1918, he studied lettered design, life drawing, and model-based courses at the Connecticut League of Art Students – setting a lifelong pattern of diligent, self-driven learning.

Late full-time artist

Avery didn’t commit fully to painting until his 40s. Though he exhibited from 1915 onward, he worked as an insurance clerk until 1925, when he moved to New York with wife Sally Michel – that same year marked his first Manhattan exhibition and his dedication to art as a full-time pursuit.

Independent vision

He joined the influential Valentine Gallery in 1935 and later Rosenberg & Co. in 1943, yet resisted aligning with any movement. Barbara Haskell remarked that Avery “bridged the gap between realist and abstract art” by pursuing a personal aesthetic unconstrained by trends.
Milton Avery, Brown Sea, 1958

Colour as thought

Avery’s genius lies not in meticulous detail or bravura gesture, but in how he distills the world into the essence of mood and colour. His figures are often faceless, his lines barely there. But the compositions breathe.
In Poetry Reading (1957), two women – his wife Sally Michel and daughter March, both artists – sit with an open book. The palette is dour: browns, ochres, greys. Yet the scene hums with emotional warmth, the shapes interlocking like soft rhymes.
Avery’s method of thinning oil paints to a near-watercolour consistency gave his canvases a luminous, floating quality.

Influential connections

Befriending Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman during the 1930s, Avery’s flat, glowing colours and simplified forms deeply impacted the next generation of Abstract Expressionists – many acknowledged him as a mentor figure.
Avery played with negative space, outline, and veils of colour in a way that prefigured the concerns of colour field painters like Rothko, who once called Avery “a great poet-inventor of the 20th century.”
Indeed, Rothko and Barnett Newman both credited Avery as a key influence. “The walls were always covered with an endless and changing array of poetry and light,” Rothko said at Avery’s memorial, describing the Upper West Side apartment where the three artists often gathered.

Museum Firsts & Fellowships

The Phillips Collection purchased his work in 1929 and hosted his first solo museum exhibition in 1944. Duncan Phillips supported Avery’s career early, acquiring the first work by the artist to enter a museum collection, Winter Riders (1929). Phillips admired his independence, associating him with other artists in the collection like Arthur Dove and John Marin. Avery was voted a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963, solidifying his critical acknowledgement late in life.

Health and subtlety

After suffering a serious heart attack in 1949, Avery shifted focus to printmaking during recovery. When he returned to painting, critics noted a subtler handling of paint and more muted tones in his work.
Milton Avery in his studio, New York City, c. late 1930s. The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation

Avery created thousands of art works

Avery’s work ethic was almost monastic. His grandson, painter Sean Avery Cavanaugh, describes a Yankee discipline: “My grandfather had a sort of New England work-hard-every-day kind of thing.” The Avery estate estimates he created over 1,000 oil paintings and thousands more on paper.

Legacy and collectability

Avery’s work has seen market resurgence: Sotheby’s sold his 1945 The Letter for $6 million in 2022. Despite waning attention near his death in 1965, later retrospectives – most recently at the Royal Academy (2022) – and continued estate representation by Victoria Miro, Xavier Hufkens, and Karma gallery have revived his status.
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