Coney Island, 1931
Oil on canvas
by Milton Avery
Taken in the Exhibition
By 1926 Avery was living in New York and working full-time as an artist. Avery took advantage of the access to art offered by the city, and he and his wife, Sally, spent every Saturday visiting galleries and museums. In 1929 the Museum of Modern Art opened, allowing Avery’s interest in European Modernism to grow as he saw more examples of the movement’s works.
In addition to using the sketches he had executed throughout the summer months, Avery also turned to the city for inspiration for his paintings, in particular to its human activity and crowds.
[Royal Academy]
Milton Avery: American Colourist
(July — October 2022)
Recognised as an important and influential twentieth-century American artist, Milton Avery’s entry into the art world was somewhat unconventional. Born in 1885 in Altmar, New York, into a working-class family that finally settled in Connecticut, near Hartford, Avery left school at sixteen to work in a factory. Four years later, in an attempt to improve his earning potential, he enrolled in an evening class in ‘commercial lettering’ at the Connecticut League of Art Students and soon after transferred to drawing, so commencing a fifteen-year part-time study of art and a lifetime dedicated to drawing and painting.
Avery’s work spanned and, to some extent, became the link between two significant movements in the United States in the twentieth-century, American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, with both having an impact on his oeuvre. Through his close association with some of the younger key exponents of Abstract Expressionism, Avery’s early work played an influential role in how the movement later developed and unfolded. Never affiliated to any particular group or tendency, Avery followed his own artistic inclination. With his steadfast adherence to representation and the innovative ways in which he balanced colour and form within his compositions, he often appeared to be running counter to the prevailing trends of the time.
In 1926 Avery was married and living in New York, where he was to three months every summer at different locations of natural beauty, where he documented the landscape, providing material and inspiration for the later studio paintings.
This retrospective survey presents a selection of Avery’s finest work from across his career and charts his constant development, revealing his unique ability to create exquisitely balanced poetic compositions of colour and form.
[Royal Academy]
Coney Island, 1931
Oil on canvas
by Milton Avery
Taken in the Exhibition
By 1926 Avery was living in New York and working full-time as an artist. Avery took advantage of the access to art offered by the city, and he and his wife, Sally, spent every Saturday visiting galleries and museums. In 1929 the Museum of Modern Art opened, allowing Avery’s interest in European Modernism to grow as he saw more examples of the movement’s works.
In addition to using the sketches he had executed throughout the summer months, Avery also turned to the city for inspiration for his paintings, in particular to its human activity and crowds.
[Royal Academy]
Milton Avery: American Colourist
(July — October 2022)
Recognised as an important and influential twentieth-century American artist, Milton Avery’s entry into the art world was somewhat unconventional. Born in 1885 in Altmar, New York, into a working-class family that finally settled in Connecticut, near Hartford, Avery left school at sixteen to work in a factory. Four years later, in an attempt to improve his earning potential, he enrolled in an evening class in ‘commercial lettering’ at the Connecticut League of Art Students and soon after transferred to drawing, so commencing a fifteen-year part-time study of art and a lifetime dedicated to drawing and painting.
Avery’s work spanned and, to some extent, became the link between two significant movements in the United States in the twentieth-century, American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, with both having an impact on his oeuvre. Through his close association with some of the younger key exponents of Abstract Expressionism, Avery’s early work played an influential role in how the movement later developed and unfolded. Never affiliated to any particular group or tendency, Avery followed his own artistic inclination. With his steadfast adherence to representation and the innovative ways in which he balanced colour and form within his compositions, he often appeared to be running counter to the prevailing trends of the time.
In 1926 Avery was married and living in New York, where he was to three months every summer at different locations of natural beauty, where he documented the landscape, providing material and inspiration for the later studio paintings.
This retrospective survey presents a selection of Avery’s finest work from across his career and charts his constant development, revealing his unique ability to create exquisitely balanced poetic compositions of colour and form.
[Royal Academy]