Provincetown Artist Registry, Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, New England

PROVINCETOWN ARTIST REGISTRY

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Milton Avery

1885-1965

Avery Milton

Milton Avery, “Untitled” (Seated Woman in Blue), n.d., Oil on Canvas, 24” x 20” (Signed Lower Right) - Private Collection

Milton Avery

Museum of Modern Art: Milton Avery. (American, 1893-1965). Sea Grasses and Blue Sea. 1958. Oil on canvas, 60 1/8" x 6' 3/8" (152.7 x 183.7 cm). Gift of friends of the artist. © 2007 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Publication excerpt

The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 227

Avery painted scenes of nature throughout his career, but he preferred simple forms to realistic details, and his palette is distinctively personal. The results come close to abstraction. In Sea Grasses and Blue Sea (based on Avery's memories of Provincetown, Massachusetts), the sky is a straight and narrow blue band at the painting's upper rim. The rest of the canvas is divided into two trapezoids of almost equal size and shape. The lower of these, the sea grass, is pale and lightly streaked, and echoes the tonality of the sky; above it is a wedge of a predominantly darker, saturated blue, with patches both of a lighter blue and, more sharply, of deep black. Magically, the overall effect is of waves flecked with white foam.

That black is paradoxical: as Matisse remarked of the black in one of his own paintings, it is used as "a color of light and not as a color of darkness." In various ways, in fact, Avery is closer to Henri Matisse than to the styles that prevailed in America during his lifetime-in his love of clarified form and flat color, for example, and in the sense of rich serenity that permeates his art.

Provincetown Art Association and Museum: Towards the end of his life, Milton Avery summered in Provincetown (1954-60), and produced the large evocative canvases of the sea, sky, and dunes that are the triumph of his career, as well as being some of the most impressive paintings ever made of the Cape.

Our picture is characteristic of his earlier work: the painting of a friend in a domestic, intimate, setting. The quirky foreshortening and the angular shape of the woman are typical; but not the fussy detailing—which would later be subsumed into clear shapes melding into a radiant composition based on color.

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The Collection of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, March 3-13, 2000, The National Arts Club, New York, NY; Curatorial Notes: Tony Vevers