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Artist or Maker: Milton Avery (1885-1965)
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Exhibited: New York, The Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere, American Art from the Museum of Modern Art, 1979-1980.
United States Ambassador's residence, Beijing, China, May 1986-May 1988.
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Notes: Property from the Museum of Modern Art, Sold to Benefit the Acquisitions Fund*
Painted in 1958, Morning Dunes has the distinctive character of simplified forms and blocks of color that we have come to associate with Avery's oeuvre in the 1950s. In addition to their broad popular appeal, Avery's bold abstractions exerted a highly important influence on Post-War American painting and have been seen as critical forerunners to the works of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottleib, among others.
Many scholars attribute these later developments in Avery's characteristic style to his professional affiliation with Paul Rosenberg's gallery. Avery's relationship with Rosenberg exposed him to modern European artists and their abstract ideals. Rosenberg arrived in America in 1940, bringing with him a cachet of great works by important European artists that provided Avery with a new understanding of abstract representation.
Barbara Haskell has explained these influences, "Rosenberg's proclivity for taut structure and architectonic solidity encouraged Avery to emphasize these aspects of his work. He replaced the brushy paint application and graphic detailing that had informed his previous efforts with denser more evenly modulated areas of flattened color contained with crisply delineated forms. The result was a more abstract interlocking of shapes and a shallower pictorial space than he had previously employed. Avery retained color as the primary vehicle of feeling and expression, but achieved a greater degree of abstraction by increasing the parity between recognizable forms and abstract shapes." ("Milton Avery: The Metaphysics of Color," Milton Avery: Paintings from the Collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, 1994, pp. 8-9)
In 1957, one year before he painted Morning Dunes, Avery's approach to painting evolved. The artist began to paint on larger canvases due to the influence of the paintings by Abstract Expressionists, "to create an image so large that it would take up the viewer's field of vision -- and hence occupy the entire consciousness." (B. Haskell, Milton Avery, New York, 1982, p. 148) Along with the increased size of his canvases, Avery also intensified the abstraction in his works. With increasing frequency, the artist simplified colors and shapes to produce a starkness as seen in Morning Dunes, to lend to the emptiness and quietude of his later works.
Representative of Avery's style of the 1950s, in Morning Dunes the artist creates tension and balance through his selection of complimentary and contrasting colors and shapes. While he simplifies the Provincetown shore to the broadest possible forms, he invigorates these shapes through his sophisticated use of imbued hues. Avery sets the highly saturated cool palette of greens and blues against the softer, more pastel yellows, pinks and light blues. The shapes of color in the painting are balanced by the hard edges of the jagged lines of the grasses juxtaposed against a background of the smooth, curving lines of the rounded hills of sand. Here, Avery uses blocks of color both as expression and as a way to modulate space as he suggests recession through the planes of color and their arrangement on the two-dimensional surface. In 1952, Avery discussed his use of color, "I do not use linear perspective, but achieve depth by color -- the function of one color with another. I strip the design to the essentials; the facts do not interest me as much as the essence of nature." (as quoted in R. Hobbs, Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, New York, 2001, p. 51)
Amplifying his notion of embarking on a quest for the essential in his 1950s painting, Avery described his style, "I like to seize the one sharp instant in Nature, to imprison it by means of ordered shapes and space relationships. To this end I eliminate and simplify, leaving apparently nothing but color and pattern. I am not seeking pure abstraction; rather, the purity and essence of the idea -- expressed in its simplest form." (as quoted in R. Hobbs, Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, New York, 2001, p. 53)
Tax exempt
