Milton Avery: The American Matisse

Milton Avery’s paintings inspire feelings of serenity and joy. An artist’s artist, known as the American Matisse, Avery was also an inspiration to younger artists, like Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, who often visited Avery and his family in their West Village apartment.

 

Avery’s daughter, March, also an artist, said that days would go by without her father speaking a word. She said that his silence irritated her mother, artist Sally Michel, Averys wife of nearly forty years. “Why talk when you can paint?” Avery is quoted as saying.

 

 

Although he was quiet, Avery liked to socialize and he and Sally often entertained guests in their apartment. "People who knew him tell me that he would wait for the right moment and then say the funniest or most direct things in a single sentence” March said. “And then go back to not saying anything....Maybe he didn’t have much to say. He said it all on canvas.”

 

In 1965, the year that Avery died, at age 79, Mark Rothko gave a commemorative talk about Avery at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, succinctly describing the Avery’s life and practice. ”What was Avery's repertoire? His living room, Central Park, his wife Sally, his daughter March, the beaches and mountains where they summered; cows, fish heads, the flight of birds; his friends and whatever world strayed through his studio: a domestic, unheroic cast. But from these there have been fashioned great canvases, that far from the casual and transitory implications of the subjects, have always a gripping lyricism, and often achieve the permanence and monumentality of Egypt.”

 

Milton Avery’s paintings can be found in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, the National Portrait Gallery in D.C., the Hirshhorn, the Met, MoMA, the Tate Modern, London and many other major museums. He painted Florida landscapes and lizards and his works are in the permanent collections of the Harn Museum in Gainesville, the Maitland Art Center and the Vero Beach Museum.

 

---

 

 In 2023, the Nahmad Contemporary Gallery in Gstaad exhibited the works of Henri Matisse alongside the works of Jonas Wood. The connection between the two artists, separated by nearly a century and a vast ocean, is the way in which each used color, space, patterns and interior and exterior domestic space in their compositions.

 

An homage to Matisse is Jonas Wood’s screenprint Matisse Pot #4, 2019, available at Surovek Gallery.

 

The work of Jonas Wood is included in a current exhibit at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing will be on view through March 4, 2024.

 

---

 

 Please contact us if you would like more information about the works of Milton Avery and Jonas Wood available at Surovek Gallery.

 

---

 

May 16, 2024