Milton Avery

birth year 1885 confirmed by AAC curator Brian Lang, 8-22-2013(http://www.milton-avery.com/ 11-2-09)Milton Avery was born at Sand Bank, New York, today known as Altmar, on 7 March 1893 (1885?). After studying for a while at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford under Charles Noel Flagg and at the Art Society School there under Albertus Jones, Avery worked in manufacturing and with an insurance company until 1924. He moved to New York in 1925 and married the artist Sally Michel, an illustrator, a year later. He had his first one-man show as early as 1928 at the Opportunity Gallery in New York. The decades that followed saw him show work at numerous exhibitions mounted by New York galleries and American museums. Avery's preoccupation with French Fauvism and German Expressionism led him to develop a simplified formal idiom distinguished by clarity of line and an expressive palette. Whereas Avery's early figurative drawings and paintings from the 1930s attest to affinities primarily with the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, by the 1940s he was discernibly close to Henri Matisse. As the American upholder of Matisse's colouristic doctrine, Avery developed the French artist's decorative colour surfaces into subtly toned colour zones, thus breaking the ground for the Colour Field painting of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, both of whom were friends of his. Even though his style was close to abstraction, Avery nonetheless clung to representation throughout his entire career. Classical motifs and subject matter in portraits, still lifes and coastal landscapes were his main thematic areas and genres. Prolific as a painter, graphic artist and ceramist, Avery received numerous awards from American art institutions before he died in 1965 although he only really became famous posthumously. Now he is acclaimed as one of the most influential US 20th-century artists.(Source: Smithsonian American Museum nmaa-ryder.si.edu )Born in Sand Bank (now Altmar), New York, Milton Avery moved to Hartford, Connecticut, with his family in 1898. He held many jobs, working as an assembler, latheman, and mechanic before enrolling in a lettering class at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford in 1905. Charles Noel Flagg, the school's director, persuaded Avery to transfer to a life-drawing class, which launched his career in fine arts. In 1918 Avery transferred to the School of Art at the Society of Hartford and exhibited his work while also holding down a variety of jobs, among them clerk and construction worker. In 1924 he became a member of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts and a year later moved to New Jersey. From 1926 to 1938, he attended sketch classes at the Art Students League in New York, where he became a friend of Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. In 1938 Avery worked as an artist in the Easel Division of the WPA Federal Art Project. About 1949, Avery began to experiment with monotypes. In 1952 he visited Europe and began working in woodcut. By 1957, his paintings had become much larger in scale. Among the many places that exhibited Averys work were the Phillips Memorial Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York.