Art Knowledge News
"Placing Avery"...at Neuberger |
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| Wednesday, 13 July 2005 16:26 |
Neuberger Museum of Art. Purchase, NY, USA. Placing Avery, on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art, groups work by Milton Avery with artists he admired, artists he knew and artists he influenced.The exhibition features twelve paintings and prints by Avery, and twenty-two paintings, prints and drawings by other artists, all drawn from the permanent collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art. Milton Avery had a strong, “Connecticut Yankee” work ethic. He painted for 50 years, some times spending all day for weeks at a time at his easel, and sometimes creating as many as five or six paintings or studies in one day. He’s been quoted as saying, “Why talk when you can paint?” He loved to travel as much as he loved to paint, and his travels instilled in him a love of nature, natural settings, and color, which he invested in his landscapes and seascapes. Avery also painted familiar, intimate moments of his family and friends, his home and his studio.
Avery’s sensibility was rooted in the combination of American regionalism and European and American impressionism. Beginning in the 1920s as a relatively traditional painter, Avery’s style changed and evolved, ultimately taking him to the brink of abstraction. Although he was influenced by many illustrious forebears, including Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Maurice Prendergast, and contemporaries such as his friends Marsden Hartley, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman, Avery’s style remained uniquely his own, even as he experimented with multiple stylistic approaches. He became a master of flat, two-dimensional objects in which the painting itself is the subject matter. His masterly use of color secured his place as a central figure in twentieth-century art. His intertwining of flatness with vivid coloration can be experienced in the work of younger artists whose creativity he impacted, including Willian Baziotes, Helen Frankenthaler, and Alex Katz. At Avery’s memorial service in 1965, Mark Rothko famously remarked: “There have been several others in our generation who have celebrated the world around them, but none with that inevitability where the poetry penetrated every pore of the canvas to the very last touch of the brush. For Avery was a great poet-inventor who had invented sonorities never seen or heard before. From these we have learned much and will learn more for a long time to come.” IMAGE...Milton Avery ROOSTER'S DOMAIN, 1948 oil on canvas...30 x 40 inchesClick on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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