MILTON AVERY AND THE END OF MODERNISM PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Karl Emil Willers | 80 pages | 01 Feb 2011 | State University of New York Press | 9780615401812 | English | Albany, NY, United States Milton Avery and the End of Modernism Keith Warner, by Parke-Bernet, New York, 15 December , lot William H. Weintraub, New York, acquired from the above. By descent to the present owner from the above. Initial compositions of the Madonna and Child, by the likes of Giotto and Cimabue in the thirteenth century, later by Titian, were carried on by Rapheal and others during the Renaissance, and further still into the Baroque. The subject transitioned from the religious context into the secular realm and was carried into portraits of English aristocracy, such as those by Joshua Reynolds during the eighteenth century, and the romantic realism of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, before being embraced by Impressionist painters of the late nineteenth century. However, unlike those who came before him, Avery set out to render such seemingly mundane yet contemplative subjects in a modern lexicon of forms that fit together into an equally poetic arrangement. When Rosenberg arrived in America in , he brought a cache of great works by important European artists, including Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, many of whom provided Avery with a new understanding on abstract representation. Picasso himself was no stranger to modernizing the age old subject of mother and child, addressing it on a number of occasions, including in Mother and Child , Art Institute of Chicago. 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. Avery has reduced the composition to a myriad of cutouts that fashion a cohesive puzzle of abstract forms. The painter creates tension and balance through his selection of complementary and contrasting colors and shapes. While he simplifies the scene to the broadest possible elements, he invigorates these shapes through his sophisticated use of variegated hues. The result is an emphasis on the central figure, pushing our focus forward to the mother figure and her intimate relationship with her child. As Avery noted, "I work on two levels. 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. But Rothko and Gottlieb would come around and study his paintings and just absorb them by osmosis. One summer in Gloucester, Milton refused to show them what he was doing, because he felt they were becoming too dependent upon him. Avery, a representational painter, influenced the future development of abstract art. Avery wrote, "I am not seeking pure abstraction; rather, the purity and essence of the idea--expressed in its simplest form. His is the poetry of sheer loveliness, of sheer beauty. Thanks to him this kind of poetry has been able to survive in our time. This- alone-took great courage in a generation which felt that it could be heard only through clamor, force and a show of power. Cambridge, Mass. Neuberger Museum of Art , Purchase, N. Grove Art Online. The Davistown Museum. Retrieved 15 September American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 28 April Was Self-Taught". New York Times. January 4, Retrieved 20 April Arts Magazine. Breeskin, Milton Avery , Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. Retrieved 6 May Memorial Art Gallery Collection. Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. The Albert M. Greenfield American Art Resource Online. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. San Antonio Art League Museum. Retrieved Namespaces Article Talk. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file. Download as PDF Printable version. Modern art , painting. Milton Avery’s modernism | Apollo Magazine If it was his marriage that freed Avery to become a full-time painter for the first time, it was his move to New York that was decisive in making him the kind of painter he became. The training he had received in Hartford was solid but academic, and its outlook on art preety much precluded any awareness of the modern movement that had already shattered the academic tradition in Europe. Even in the New York art world of the 's, moderism remained an isolated and special interest, and one that was virgorously opposed by amny artists and most of the critics, collectors and museum curators. But it was there to be seen, all the same, in certain galleries and exhibitions, and it had at least one ardent champion in the press - Henry McBride, the critic who wrote for both The New York Suna dn the more highbrow Dial magazine. As early as , McBride mentioned Avery in a review of the large group exhibition of the Socieyt of Independent Artists that year; and in he wrote of Avery: ''He really is a colorist of exceptional ability. But Avery's own conversion to modernism was no overnight affair. And if he proceeded with a certain caution in this course, there was ample reason for it. All of Avery's closest contacts in the New York art world were painters of an academic dispostion. He was at home with their training, their tastes and their sense of tradition. They defined a world that was familiar to him - and he was anything but a rebel by temperment. Yet, at the same time, he found himself strongly drawn to something in the modernist painting that he now saw for the first time, and this began to separate him from the narrow outlook of academic taste. He recognized in the radical innovations of the modernists - especially in the work of Matisse and Picasso - a creative freedom and an imaginative release that elicited a deep personal response. Not being an intellectual, Avery took no interest in the doctrines or theories of the European modernists. What attracted him, rather, was the new range of pictorial possibilities he saw in their work. It opened up for him -and in him - a new world of feeling. He was not immediately prepared, however, to scuttle what he knew in favor of this new and unfamiliar world of daring expression. What he at first attempted, therefore, was a fusion of tradition and modernism, and this gave his art a very solid base from which to launch his subsequent innovations. It was unquestionably the work of Matisse that exerted the strongest single influence on Avery and completed his conversion to modernism. For it was Matisse, more than any other modern painter, who evolved a pictorial style based on pure structures of color. It was Matisse who introduced a formal pictorial vocabulary consisting of highly simplified shapes that served at once to eliminate the kind of modeling that is based on strong contrasts of light and shadow and to emphasize the essentially flat, two-dimensional nature of the painting surface. This was a more radical innovation in painting than many observers at the time including many sympatheric to the avant-garde quite appreciated - probably because, in Matisse's case, it was so conspicuously combined with an interest in subjects, such as female nudes and sundrenched landscapes, that were traditionally associated with pleasure. Avery was almost alone among American painters of the 's in finding an inspiration in Matisse. He paid a price for it, too. For it isolated him from the American art of his time. Academics hated everything that was associated with modern painting, including Matisse. For amny followers for the avant-garde, the cutting edge of modernism lay in Cubism and the kind of abstraction that came out of it. And the powerful supporters of the American Scene painters and the Social Realists in the 's considered an art like Avery's to be alien both to native experience and to the political imperatives of the Depression era. Nor could he expect much support from admirers of Matisse, for they tended to dismiss Avery as a mere imitator of the French master. It would be many years before Avery's originality came to be widely appreciated. Today, many artists at the age of 50 would already have had their retrospectives. But Avery at that age could count only on his wife and a few artist friends to appreciate what he was up to. One of these artists was Adolph Gottlieb, who later said of Avery in this period that he was ''a solitary figure working against the stream. Still, Avery persevered in this lonely course, and in the 's, his painting really developed in tse way that is now familiar to us. He became a bolder colorist, eliminating the last traces of naturalistic contrast in favor of close-valued color - color that gave a uniform visual weight and consistency to every part of the picture surface. To accommodate this change in his composition, he emphasized fewer and simpler shapes. And Avery painting came more and more to consist of a very few flat shapes containing exquisitely related colors, and the color grew increasingly independent of the themes that prompted it - less a matter of description and more of pure invention. The application of color also underwent an important change - a change that was to become even more marked in his paintings of the 's.