1986.13

Visual Arts CommitteePEP Permanent Collection Fund

Purchase

Permanent Collection Fund and Visual Arts Committee

1941

Signature

Bottom left-hand corner

Milton Avery

Ink

14-1/4 in

7-5/8 in

BlackWhite

INTRO: Community Selections (2013)

Milton Avery studied at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford from 1905-11 and by 1918 attended the School of the Art Society of Hartford.  His work through the 1920s – all land and seascapes – closely resembles American Impressionism, particularly Ernest Lawson and Twachtman. In 1925 Avery had an important turning point after viewing Matisse works.  Avery stylistically changed and followed Matisse at a time when most leading American painters worked in the sober naturalism of American Scene Painting.  Avery, called the “American Matisse,” practically alone sustained this subtle colorist tradition in the US up to the 1940s. By the 1940s Avery had reached maturity, reducing the elements of his compositions to simplicity and eliminating all extraneous detail, working with flat shapes and surface qualities, and still using arbitrary colors as Matisse did.  He treated the picture plane with decorative, flat, often interlocking shapes of attractive color and flowing lines. His continued formalism influenced the Color Field painters: Rothko, Gottlieb, Newman, Frankenthaler, etc.  Unlike them Avery never abandoned representation, often rendering seaside and figures.  In 1943 Rothko and Gottlieb, in a letter to the NY Times, criticized Avery for his continued subject matter – as the Abstract Expressionists eliminated even that.  However, Milton Avery’s late works have such stripped-down compositional elements one can at first mistake them for nonrepresentational abstractions. Atelier 17 printed Avery’s drypoint plates in 1948 under the direction of William Stanley Hayter.  Though relatively small in size Standing Nude exists as one of Avery’s largest drypoint intaglios.  In it he has sketched energetically, using gestural marks, the nude female form up against a wall in nonspecific, shallow space.  Manipulating anatomical shapes, simplifying and exaggerating, Avery accentuates what he views as “essential” about his model.  Purdue acquired Standing Nude in 1986.