Milton Avery

(1885-1965)

Dunes and Blue Sea 24 3/4 x 29 7/8in (62.9 x 75.9cm)

Footnotes

Provenance
The artist.
Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, California.
André Previn, acquired from the above, 1961.
Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, Illinois.
Acquired by the late owner from the above, January 28, 1971.

Exhibited
Los Angeles, California, Felix Landau Gallery, Milton Avery: Recent Paintings, October 16-November 4, 1961, no. 38.
Chicago, Illinois, Richard Gray Gallery, Milton Avery, Important Paintings, April 18-May, 1981, no. 38.

Dunes and Blue Sea is a bold example of Milton Avery's maturing style of the 1950s and 1960s. At this stage in his career, Avery's pictorial focus shifted from describing the individual parts of his subjects to instead focusing on a harmony among the composition's elements. Avery began exploring ways to create compositional harmony through the simplification of shape and reduction of detail as early as 1944, but by the 1950s and onward, he mastered this vision that allowed him to achieve balance and to better express more universal qualities of experience. His mature painting technique incorporated large thin washes of paint, sometimes one over the other, to create textural, veiled strokes of color. The result was a body of work that is reminiscent of the Color Field paintings that would be popularized by his contemporaries and close acquaintances, such as Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) who were at the forefront of abstract expressionism.

In the present work, Avery has deconstructed land, sea and sky so they serve as both simplified abstract forms and as referential objects. Furthermore, he uses flat planes of color—a deep navy and golden yellow—to depict these elements. Avery maintains the illusion of depth through bold diagonal lines that divide the work into three parts. The division of the work creates slanted diagonal planes, a compositional device that he often favored in earlier decades and would continuously revisit later, such as in Sand, Sea and Sky (1960, The Larivière Collection, Montreal, Canada) and in White Umbrella (1961, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Martin Lederman). In Dunes and Blue Sea, the viewer's eye moves upward from the sandy shore at the foreground to the dark blue sea and then finally through the grassy dunes and yellow sky above. Though not depicted, it is strongly implied that the shoreline in the foreground curves around at left beyond the picture plane to connect with the dunes and form an inlet. This provides an interesting and more abstracted perspective compared to other works Avery completed in earlier years depicting this type of landscape or seascape. In Dunes and Sea I (Milton Avery Trust, New York) from 1958 for example, Avery more clearly defines and describes the boundaries of the shoreline and chooses a more aerial view of the scene.

Avery's inspiration for Dunes and Blue Sea most likely stems from his summers of 1957 through 1960 that were spent in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Reflecting on these summers, Avery remarked, "I have always been drawn to the sea. After a number of summers spent inland, I came to Provincetown - to a little house on the bay. Birds and sea surrounded me and many wonderful hours were spent just watching." (as quoted in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, College of Fine and Applied Arts, Contemporary American Paintings and Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, Champaign, Illinois, 1959, p. 192) Though he remained in New York during the summer when the present work was painted, due to his deteriorating health, his memory of the beaches of Provincetown stayed with him. Avery masterfully evokes a tenderness for these familiar beaches and celebrates the beauty of life itself in Dunes and Blue Sea. In Avery's final years, he continued to paint as long as he could, living by his own credo to "keep painting - day in, day out. Be absorbed by it. Hold on to the dream - try to make the great dream a reality." (as quoted in Contemporary American Paintings and Sculpture, 1959, p. 192) The rising generation of American color painters would look toward Avery's achievements with admiration and for inspiration, making his work eternal. Avery's color harmonies and relationships between his simplified forms from this mature stage in his career continue to remain captivating and fresh.