Milton Avery
February 8 - March 11, 2006

DC Moore Gallery’s fifth one-person show devoted to the work of Milton Avery (1885-1965) opens on Wednesday, February 8 and continues through Saturday, March 11. The exhibition brings together a number of important oil paintings and watercolors, including the magnificent 1948 painting Sketcher with Flowers.

Only a few 20th century artists can equal Milton Avery’s singularity of purpose and devotion to his personal aesthetic vision. Working with total commitment to his ideas and with complete unconcern for movements or labels, Avery believed that an artist’s first obligation was to be true to his art and its demands. His was an independent vision in which everything extraneous was removed and only the essential components were retained. Avery’s remarkable color sense, his chromatic harmonies of striking subtlety and invention, paved the way for later generations of American colorists. Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb are among the many artists who have acknowledged a profound debt to Avery and his work.

In retrospect, Avery stands as a solitary figure in mid-twentieth century American art. As Barbara Haskell observes in the monograph which accompanied the Whitney Museum’s 1982 retrospective exhibition, “Avery combined an engagement with purely aesthetic issues with a loyalty to the observed motif. In doing so, he bridged the gap between realist and abstract art. That he initially did this in the twenties and thirties, when subject matter and ‘realist’ painting were paramount and, later, in the forties and fifties, when they were suspect, attests to the independence of the vision, which he sustained throughout his life. His reluctance to position his work within the confines of a single style or rhetorical posture confounded critics and probably delayed the acknowledgment of his deserved place in the history of twentieth-century American art.”

Milton Avery was born in 1885 in upstate New York, the youngest of four children in a working-class family. He studied at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford from 1905 to 1918 and then at the Art Society in Hartford. Obliged by family circumstances to work from an early age, Avery did not achieve his goal of becoming a serious, full-time painter until he moved to New York City in 1925. His early years account for a rigorous work ethic, as Barbara Haskell describes, “Painting was Avery’s work; he approached it with utter dedication, eliminating all unrelated activities and interests...His sense of discipline pushed him to rise at the same early hour each morning and paint or sketch most of the day.”

Although Avery exhibited extensively during the 1930s, it is generally agreed that the mature phase of his career began after he joined the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in 1943. Rosenberg was associated with the European avant-garde and also represented Americans Max Weber and Marsden Hartley. Critically well respected throughout his career, Avery always stood firmly outside of prevailing art world trends. His emergence as a major figure in mid-20th century American art came during the 1960s, when the upheavals that had occurred during the previous decade caused his achievement to be reevaluated in a new light.

Concurrently on view: Jacob Lawrence – Mural Studies.

Jacob Lawrence:
Mural Studies
February 8 - March 11, 2006

After four decades of working in relatively modest dimensions on paintings intended primarily for museum and private viewing, Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) accepted his first public mural commission in 1978. Stimulated by the very different requirements involved in creating public art for specific sites, during the following years Lawrence completed a number of public art projects. Possibly one of the reasons he found the transition from studio work to public art so effortless is that the public itself had always been one of his most consistent themes.

The exhibition is comprised of studies from four of the eight public projects executed by Lawrence, including: the tempera and gouache studies for the four-part Space, Time, Energy, mural commissioned for Orlando International Airport, Florida in 1988; mosaic studies for Community, executed in 1986-88 for the Joseph P. Addabbo Federal Building in Queens, New York and Origins (1984) for Howard University’s Armour J. Blackburn University Center, Washington, D.C.; the gouache on paper study New York in Transit I, 1996, one of two maquettes for the mural at Times Square Subway Complex, New York City; and the silkscreen prints based on the Times Square murals, New York in Transit I and II, which were published in 1988 to provide research and funding for a catalogue raisonné on Lawrence’s paintings, drawings, and murals.

Jacob Lawrence is a towering figure in the history of twentieth century American art. For over six decades, starting with his 1930s works depicting life in Harlem on to his series’ depicting major events of American history and the Builders series, which was so important during the last three decades of his life, Lawrence has been considered one of America’s preeminent painters.

Over the last decade, a number of major traveling exhibitions of Lawrence’s work have been presented in museums across the country. These include: Jacob Lawrence: American Painter, organized by the Seattle Museum of Art; Jacob Lawrence: The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman Series of 1938-40, organized by the Hampton University Museum in Virginia; and Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series, organized jointly by the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A major retrospective exhibition Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence originated in 2001 at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, and the Seattle Art Museum. A definitive two-volume catalogue raisonné and examination of Lawrence’s life and work, also titled Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, was published in the fall of 2000 by the University of Washington Press.

Concurrently on view : Milton Avery.