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signed Milton Avery and dated 1957, l.l.; also inscribed "Red Sun"/ by/ Milton Avery/ 44 x 50/ 1957 on the reverse

oil on canvas

This painting will be included in Dr. Marla Price's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of works by Milton Avery.
PROVENANCE

Dr. and Mrs. Donald Nielson, Detroit, Michigan
Donald Morris Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan
Acquired by the present owner from the above, circa 1982
EXHIBITED

Hartford, Connecticut, The Wadsworth Athenaeum, Paintings of Milton Avery, May 1964
Detroit, Michigan, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Selections from Collections of the Friends of Modern Art, May-June 1969, no. 19
CATALOGUE NOTE

Milton Avery and his wife, Sally, spent the summer of 1957 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Avery, whose interest in color was shared with the Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, began during this summer to enlarge his canvases and focus almost exclusively on the harmonies of color. Barbara Haskell writes, "Along with this expansion of scale came a further reduction of compositional elements and a heightened degree of abstraction. While Avery was doubtless encouraged to move further toward abstraction by the example of Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman, his progression was not sudden; precedents for these increasingly abstract works exist in his own early paintings?those same paintings, which had initially inspired the younger artists. ...

"Rothko's and Newman's art had confirmed that a painting's greatness could reside in its purely formal properties. Although deeply impressed by the achievements of these artists, Avery was not willing to abandon his commitment to representational references by embracing an art-for-art's-sake ideology. Deriving his images from reality provided him with an inexhaustible supply of motifs, continually replenished by the visible world. As a result his formal vocabulary, unlike that of some non-objective painters, was never reduced to a single format, but remained richly varied. 'I work on two levels,' he had written in 1951. 'I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea.' His work thus remained poised between objective depictions and non-objective depictive aesthetic issues; by anchoring his work in subject matter while simultaneously giving fundamental importance to formal characteristics, Avery reconciled modernism with his own commitment to recognizable imagery" (Milton Avery, New York, 1982, pp. 148, 153, 156).

While Avery did not succumb completely to abstraction, he did reduce his paintings to their most vital components. The artist stated, "I always take something out of my pictures. I strip the design to essentials; the facts do not interest me as much as the essence of nature" (Barbara Haskell, Milton Avery, New York, 1982, p. 148). Painted in 1957, Red Sun exemplifies Avery's growing interest in the reduction of elements, simplified forms and increasing use of strong color. The sky, painted with layers of gray, lavender and mauve paint, is punctuated by a fiery red-orange sun, while bold strokes of black, red, and pink pigment suggest a shimmering sea below.