Milton Avery 1885 - 1965

Waddington Galleries, London
Acquired from the above, 1972

London, The Waddington Galleries, 1972

Very good condition, lined, stretcher bar mark along top edge. Under UV: fine.
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In the summer of 1947, Milton Avery and his family escaped the heat of New York City by traveling to Northwest Canada where he filled his sketchbooks daily with views of the countryside. In Mountain Landscape, Avery depicts the rolling green hills and distant snowy peaks of Canada as one flat plane whose layers magically convey a sense of the spaciousness and depth of an actual panoramic view. Though they mostly lack a specificity of place, even when based on preliminary studies of particular locations, Avery's "landscapes are not just any landscapes but have the bewitching quality of recalling to each observer a particular landscape" (Una Johnson, Milton Avery: Prints and Drawings, 1930-1964, 1966, p.14).

Avery was especially interested in obtaining a simplified unity of design with expressive, evocative color without pushing his art toward pure abstraction. He used color to his advantage, as he was more concerned with overall tonal harmonies than truth to nature. His skies are rarely blue, and the magenta sky in Mountain Landscape acts as a foil to the green foreground as it frames the black mountains. Simplified bands of colors are typical of Avery's landscapes, as he worked toward his goal of reducing elements to their purest forms. "I always take something out of my pictures," he once remarked. "I strip the design to essentials; the facts do not interest me so much as the essence of nature." Though Avery pushed the limits of abstraction, he always included some detail, such as the snow on the mountains and the trees dotting the middle ground in Mountain Landscape, to keep his paintings from becoming veritable color-fields. While Avery was not interested in taking his works beyond concrete references, these landscapes, with their emphasis on bands of color, had a distinct impact on Mark Rothko, who pushed Avery's ideas fully into abstraction in his color-field paintings.