Milton Avery’s vision of modernism is the ideal balance between the realism of pre-war American painting and the pure abstraction of the Post-War period, forging the path for many prominent nonobjective artists such as Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and the proponents of Color Field painting. Indeed, his work from the last and most important period of his career, demonstrates an evolution in style, technique and intent that serve to position Avery as one of the earliest American painters of chromatic abstraction. Painted in 1959, Birds on Southern Sea, strikingly displays the distilled compositional elements and simplified areas of color and texture for which Avery is widely acclaimed today.

Though he had long been concerned with rendering the figures and forms of the world around him as simplified shapes, in the 1950s Avery pushed this tendency even further, omitting nearly all extraneous detail to leave only what he considered the core of his subject. “I always take something out of my pictures,” Avery explained, “I strip the design to essentials; the facts do not interest me as much as the essence of nature” (as quoted in Chris Ritter, “A Milton Avery Profile,” Art Digest, vol. 27, December 1, 1952, p. 12.). Though Avery’s lifelong commitment to engaging with the representational world as subject matter prevented him from ever fully embracing the pure abstraction embraced by the New York School, works like Birds on Southern Sea reveals the artist considering a painting’s meaning could exist solely in its formal qualities.