Milton Avery

(1885-1965)

Robed Nude 68 1/8 x 58 1/8 in. (173 x 147.6 cm.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, acquired from the artist.
Dr. Sidney Merians (1929-1984) and Susan Merians (1936-2009), Princeton, New Jersey, May 1968.
By descent within the family of the above.
James Reinish & Associates, New York.
Acquired from the above by the late owner, February 20, 2014.

Exhibited
New York, Grace Borgenicht Gallery, Milton Avery: Figure Paintings 1960, January 3-21, 1961.
New York, Kornblee Gallery, Figures, May-June, 1962, n.p., illustrated.
Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, Milton Avery: Paintings, 1941-1963, May 17-June 26, 1965, n.p., no. 28, illustrated, and elsewhere.
Washington, D.C., National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Milton Avery, December 12, 1969-January 25, 1970, n.p., no. 112, illustrated, and elsewhere.
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Milton Avery, September 16-December 5, 1982, pp. 173, 224, no. 140, illustrated.
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, November 30, 2001-January 27, 2002, pp. 94, 105, 112, pl. 47, and elsewhere.

Literature
H. Kramer, Milton Avery: Paintings, 1930-1960, New York and London, 1962, p. 26, pl. 3, illustrated. (as Yellow Robe)

This lot is accompanied by a letter from The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, New York.

Painted in 1960, during the most important period of his career, Milton Avery's Robed Nude encapsulates his mature style of chromatic abstraction on a monumental scale. In the late 1940s, Avery began to distill the figurative elements of his works into their base forms, removing all details of the composition which he found unnecessary. When explaining his reductive technique, Avery said "I always take something out of my pictures. I strip the design to essentials; the facts do not interest me as much as the essence of nature" (as quoted in C. Ritter, "A Milton Avery Profile," Art Digest, vol. 27, December 1, 1952, p. 28)

Born to a working-class family on the shores of Lake Ontario in upstate New York in 1885, Avery moved with his family to central Connecticut in 1898, where he intermittently enrolled at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford. After working a series of blue-collar jobs in Connecticut as a young man, Avery moved to New York City to be closer to his future bride and fellow artist Sally Michel in 1925. They married in 1926 and Avery was able to commit himself to painting full-time, when Sally became the primary breadwinner of the family as a freelance illustrator. Milton began taking classes at the Arts Students League, entrenching himself within the Modernist scene, and exhibiting works at the Society of Independent Artists and various galleries. In these early New York years, Avery exhibited with Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) at the Opportunity Gallery on 56th street, quickly befriending the younger generation of artists, which also included Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989), John Graham (1881/86-1961), and Barnett Newman (1905-1970). Through the 1930s and early 40s, Avery's practice evolved to become increasingly simplified into luminous planes of color and the similitudes to works by Henri Matisse (1869-1954), such as Young Girl with a Flower Vase, which earned him the nickname, "The American Fauve."

During his convalescence following a heart attack in 1949, Avery began experimenting with monotype printmaking. The process involves sponging layers of thinned pigments to glass and transferring the image to paper from the glass while the pigments are still wet. In the mid 1950s, when he was able to resume painting, he began incorporating elements of the printmaking process within his canvas works, applying layers of diluted paint to the surface to create subtly nuanced areas of color. As we can see in Robed Nude, Avery has used this technique to create subtle variations within his planes of color. Through utilizing his mastery and understanding of color, he used a variety of ivory white, rose quartz and raw sienna to create tonal harmonies throughout the composition. In Robed Nude, Avery has constrained himself to closely allied hues, which equalize in value and complement one another to create rhythm between the swaths of color. As Avery describes his process, "I do not use linear perspective, but achieve depth by color--the function of one color with another." (as quoted in R. Hobbs, Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, New York, 2001, p. 51)

Since the 1920s, the Avery family would summer in New England, but the summers from 1957 to 1960 would immeasurably alter the trajectory of Milton's career. In Provincetown, Massachusetts, Avery reconnected with Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, and they began working together and pushing each other to new heights. Gottlieb and Rothko progressed in new directions within their practices; Gottlieb began his series of Burst paintings and Rothko's palette became dramatically darker, but it was Avery who underwent the greatest transformation. In previous summers, Avery would paint watercolors and make sketches for studio works to be completed in the winter months; in 1957, he abandoned this practice to paint large scale canvas' "like the abstract boys," as he told local gallerist Nathan Halper. As his canvases became larger, Avery reduced the number of compositional elements within his works and enhanced the level of abstraction. It was also in 1957, that Avery was visited by famed critic Clement Greenberg, who subsequently wrote a significant article about the artist for Arts Magazine. This article brought Avery immense attention from the art world, eventually garnering him a major traveling retrospective, which kicked off at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1960.

As the world around him embraced the Abstract Expressionists and their rejection of realistic imagery, Milton Avery never abandoned representational subject matter. By sourcing his images from reality, Avery possessed an infinite supply of motifs, providing a rich variety of subjects and allowing him to continually re-interpret the physical world. "His work thus remained poised between objective depictions and non-objective aesthetic issues; by anchoring his work in subject matter while simultaneously giving fundamental importance to formal characteristics, Avery reconciled modernism with his own commitment to recognizable imagery." (B. Haskell, Milton Avery, New York, 1982, p. 156)

Painted at a time when absolute abstraction was the pinnacle of creativity, Robed Nude personifies Avery's status as "a solitary figure working against the stream," as eulogized by Adolph Gottlieb. The lone figure stands proud but modest, with arms reaching up toward the neck to cover herself but the robe has slightly opened to reveal a full breast and one contrapposto hip. He has simplified her partially nude body to the simplest lines to interpret volume and silhouette, forgoing any extemporaneous detail for purity in form. Engaged but demure, she is a self-assured woman and the sole focus of the viewer. Here Avery aims to capture the distilled essence of the figure, rather than the exact physical likeness of his subject.