Milton Avery valuation
American colourist of simplified figures, beaches and landscapes in flat, singing colour, and a mentor to Rothko.
Milton Avery was born in Altmar, New York, in 1885, the son of a tanner, and grew up in Connecticut, where he worked factory and clerical jobs for years while taking classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford.
What a work by Milton Avery is worth
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Bio
Milton Avery was born in Altmar, New York, in 1885, the son of a tanner, and grew up in Connecticut, where he worked factory and clerical jobs for years while taking classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford. After his brother-in-law's death in 1915 he supported nine women of his family, and from 1917 he took night jobs so that he could paint by day. In 1926 he married the illustrator Sally Michel, whose income let him paint full time, and they settled in New York, where he drew at the Art Students League. His mature paintings reduce figures, beaches, seascapes and landscapes to broad, flat areas of carefully tuned colour, and in the 1930s he befriended and influenced younger painters, among them Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. The Phillips Collection bought one of his paintings in 1929 and gave him his first museum solo exhibition in 1944. He died in New York in 1965.
Avery was prolific in oil, watercolour, gouache, drawing and print, and works of every kind come up regularly; his woodcuts and monotypes have their own following. A provenance through his family or his dealers is common.
Hartford, the Art Students League and Rothko
The collector Roy Neuberger bought more than a hundred of his paintings and lent and gave them to museums around the world.
His wife Sally Michel Avery and their daughter March Avery were painters too, and the family often worked side by side.
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