?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
MILTON AVERY Lakeside Trees.
Watercolor on paper, 1953. 559x762 mm; 22x30 inches. Signed and dated in pen and ink, lower right recto.
Ex-collection the artist's estate; Donald Morris Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan, with the label on the frame back; private collection, New York, thence by descent to the current owner.
Avery (1885-1965) was born to a working class family in upstate New York and came of age in Connecticut, where he began studying at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford while maintaining day jobs in mechanics and construction. He moved to New York in 1925, where he took classes at the Art Students League and began exhibiting more widely, becoming a full-time painter. Avery's work gained prominence through the 1940's and 50's after he attained representation by the presitgious Paul Rosenberg Gallery in 1943. The current work was done during this period, when Avery persisted in his individual style through the post-war years.
Avery worked in a unique style of elegant flat-color abstraction, suggesting his close ties with Abstract Expressionist color field painters Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, though he did not embrace pure abstraction and instead painted stylized figures and landscapes. As such Avery's work defies classification; in the catalogue for the Whitney Museum's 1982 retrospective of his work, the scholar Barbara Haskell notes, "Avery combined an engagement with purely aesthetic issues with a loyalty to the observed motif. In doing so, he bridged the gap between realist and abstract art. That he initially did this in the twenties and thirties, when subject matter and 'realist' painting were paramount and, later, in the forties and fifties, when they were suspect, attests to the independence of the vision which he sustained throughout his life."
