NEW YORK, NY.- The Figure is the first full-scale survey devoted to Milton Avery’s figurative paintings. The works on view span his entire career, beginning in the 1920s, when he moved to New York, and continuing through 1964, the year he completed his final canvases. Reminiscing on the home they shared for more than four decades, his wife, Sally Michel, recalled that “someone was always dropping in—a continual array of artists, relatives, models, and friends of friends,” all of whom talked about painting except Avery, “who sat quietly sketching first one and then another of the assembled group. . . . This cast,” she wrote, “provided Milton with much of his subject matter.”
Over the intervening decades, as movements such as American Impressionism, the Ashcan School, Abstract Expressionism, and Color Field painting came and went—each borrowing from him and, at times, claiming him as their own—Avery remained steadfastly focused on what was directly in front of him. His portraits and figure paintings reveal a quiet but acute observer of the human condition, one whose depictions of those who filled his life with meaning convey a palpable intimacy. These works, both pivotal and underexplored, embody his philosophy of painting as the distillation of “the purity and essence of the idea—expressed in its simplest form” through color, line, pattern, and light.
Avery arrived in New York after spending his early years working night shifts in Connecticut factories so he could study art by day. After marrying Sally, an illustrator and painter, in 1926, the couple moved into a small one-bedroom apartment near what is now Lincoln Center. Reflected Artist (1927) is among several early self-portraits created out of financial necessity but also as meditations on identity. Its naturalism reflects the academic conservatism of his early training, but by The Artist and His Wife (1928–29), his style had begun to evolve. Sally’s softly stylized features suggest the influence of Henri Matisse rather than Charles Noël Flagg, Avery’s former teacher in Connecticut. Around this time, Avery formed a conviction about color that would guide him for life. As Sally recounted to Barbara Haskell in 1982, he believed that mixing more than three colors would obscure their clarity.
Avery’s portraits of the 1930s display remarkable stylistic range. While Reader (1931) retains a modeled naturalism, Seaside, from the same year, reduces its figures to simplified, evenly colored shapes. These contrasts reflect his exposure to the vitality of New York life—the domestic sphere he shared with Sally and their daughter March; the friendships he formed with Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb; and his frequent visits to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and uptown galleries showing European modernists. The energetic brushwork of The Violinist (c. 1930) recalls the expressionism of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Edvard Munch, while the blush tones and flattened figure of Untitled (Rose Portrait) (c. 1930) suggest the influence of Picasso’s Rose Period paintings, which Avery likely encountered at MoMA that year. In Pink Baby (1933), Sally’s turquoise complexion and March’s bubblegum hue mark an early embrace of non-naturalistic color, as Avery divides the composition into interlocking planes that anticipate his mature work of the 1940s. Artist and Model (1935) demonstrates his experimental use of texture—dry brushing, incising with the back of his brush, and thinning oils with turpentine to achieve translucency. These techniques, developed in the 1930s, became hallmarks of his later practice.
Although much of their artistic life unfolded at home, the Averys spent summers seeking new scenery and subjects. Children at Seaside (1935) and Avery Family (1937–38) evoke the quiet rhythms of those coastal retreats spent sketching, reading, and contemplating the sea. In the former, Avery employs his signature sgraffito to animate the surface—transforming a flat plane into a well-defined body and adding a spectral rower in the distance. In the latter, he varies the transparency of his oils to contrast the solidity of the rocks with the pale, doll-like figure of March. A 1938 trip to Canada’s Gaspé Peninsula yielded one of Avery’s most celebrated bodies of work, represented here by Untitled (Two Fish) and Gaspé Fishermen (both 1938), where his rectangular brushstrokes echo the blocky heads and torsos of his subjects. The search for imagery also drew Avery to the circus, Coney Island, and boxing matches, where he sketched scenes of amusement and spectacle with wry humor. Restaurant (1938) borders on caricature in its depiction of a patron and maître d’ mid-gesture, while Table Tennis (c. 1940s) captures the concentration of two players wholly absorbed in their game.
Avery’s first institutional retrospective, at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, DC, in 1944 marked a turning point. Works such as Mama’s Boy (1944) and Young Musician (1945) reveal his increasing reduction of form and color to their essentials. The visible brushwork of the 1930s gives way to flat, radiant blocks of color that interlock like puzzle pieces. His figures—angular and solid—maintain a sense of vitality even as they verge on abstraction. Surface patterns, scratched into the paint or layered atop it, enliven the compositions, as in the musician’s hair or the patterned couch in Mama’s Boy. Later works, such as Porch Sitters—Sally & March (1952) and Two Nudes (1954) also synthesize modern geometry and intimate observation. In the former, the pink and purple hues of his subjects stand out against a dark umber ground, estranging the domestic yet recalling Pink Baby from two decades earlier.
The final decade of Avery’s life was shadowed by the aftermath of a 1961 heart attack that left him frail but undeterred. In these late years, he revisited familiar subjects with a new luminosity and restraint. Husband and Wife (1961) reinterprets a longtime motif with delicate radiance, while Avery Feeling Crazy (1962) and Avery Feeling Wild (1963) convey his psychological turbulence through loose, agitated brushwork far removed from the flat expanses of his earlier style. Yet other things proceeded as usual: Bather (1961) portrays March in a sun-yellow swimsuit, the artist’s daughter once again his muse—just as she had been since childhood.
In 1964, Avery completed his final paintings, among them Green Stockings, a portrait of Sally that concludes both his career and the chronology of The Figure. His devotion to his wife—herself a painter who sustained and inspired his practice—underscores what critic Emily Wasserman observed in 1970: “the lesson of Avery’s work is above all a human one, and its requisites are the time, love, and intimacy which inspired his life and work.” Odes to all three, Avery’s portraits form the lifeblood of his singular art.
—Canada Choate
