?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
MILTON AVERY Seated Nude.
Ink with flo-brush pen and pencil on paper, 1956. 432x356 mm; 17x14 inches. Signed in black ink, lower left recto. Ex-collection Donald Morris Gallery, Inc., Detroit, with the original label.
Avery (1885-1965) moved to New York from Connecticut in 1925 to pursue an art career and enrolled at the Art Students League. Around the same time, he married Sally Michel, an illustrator who was able to support them by selling her drawings. At the Art Students League, Avery's work was noticed by the collector Roy Neuberger who bought over 100 of his paintings, which he lent and donated to museums around the world.
Avery became known as the "American Matisse," a master of Color Field painting, he influenced such Abstract Expressionist luminaries as Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Helen Frankenthaler. His mature style, developed by the mid-1940s, is characterized by a reduction of elements to their essential forms, the elimination of detail, and surface patterns of flattened shapes.
