Milton Avery
Paintings and Works on Paper
January 4 – February 1, 2003

This is DC Moore Gallery's fourth one-person show devoted to tile work of Milton Avery (1885-1965) and will include more than thirty-five works by the artist including oil paintings, watercolors, gouaches and drawings.

Milton Avery's singularity of purpose and devotion to his personal aesthetic vision can be equaled by only a few 20th century artists. His 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.

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 sc), 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 ill 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."

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.