Happy Birthday Milton Avery

Modernist Milton Avery was born on this day in 1885.

While working in a factory in Connecticut as a young man, Avery saw an advertisement for a class in lettering at the Connecticut League of Art Students and enrolled. He thought he might make money at this pursuit, but when the class was canceled—just a month after he entered—he took a life drawing class instead.

In 1918, while working for an insurance company at night, he studied at the School of the Art Society of Hartford. The following year, he won top honors in the portrait and life drawing classes.…

Avery's early training had prepared him for a career as an academic painter. But he frequented the New York galleries that exhibited modernist European art.… By 1930, references to Matisse and Picasso can be discerned in Avery's paintings, and he began to introduce the simplified forms and flattened space that would, along with clear, unmodulated color, become the hallmarks of his later work.

Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg. The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction 1930–1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1989).

Pictured: Milton Avery, 1885–1965, Flight, 1955, color woodcut on paper, 7 x 9 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.