NEW YORK, NY.- Knoedler & Company presents, in cooperation with the artist’s family and the Milton Avery Trust, Milton Avery: Industrial Revelations, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper (including both watercolors and gouaches) depicting the urban and industrial landscape of the 1920s and 1930s, most painted in and around New York City. A relatively little-known body of work, from the early years of Avery’s mature career, many of the paintings and works on paper in this exhibition have never been previously exhibited.

Distinguished scholar Gail Levin has contributed a well-researched and informative essay for the exhibition catalogue. American art between the wars, in particular the work of Edward Hopper, is a special focus of Levin’s scholarship, and she not only considers Avery’s work of this period with contemporary works by Charles Demuth, Raphael Soyer, Hopper, and others, but also re-contextualizes it within the prevailing machine age aesthetic of the interwar years, as exemplified in the work of Louis Lozowick, Fernand Léger, Charles Sheeler, and others. This assessment is an entirely fresh perspective on Avery’s development that lends a new layer of complexity to his later, predominantly rural subjects—his iconic land- and seascapes—and the subsequent, largely pastoral, readings of his work. In addition, Levin has devoted considerable research to identifying specific locales depicted in the paintings.

Gail Levin is a Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at Baruch College and The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Her work has been recognized with grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Fulbright Association, The Getty Research Institute, the Pollock-Krasner / Stony Brook Foundation, Harvard University, Yale University, and Brandeis University, among others. She has organized numerous exhibitions internationally. Her publications include Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné; Hopper’s Places; Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography; Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist, and many other books and essays. Her biography of Lee Krasner is forthcoming in 2011.