Milton Avery 1885 - 1965

Commissioned from the artist in 1946

This work is in good condition. The canvas is strip lined. There are stretcher bar marks along all four edges. Under UV: there is some minor inpainting to address the stretcher bar marks at upper left and upper right.
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Milton Avery’s 1946 painting, Portrait of Sophie Sampliner, demonstrates the artist’s distinctive interpretation of the human figure, which he rendered through broad planes of subtle color and pared down forms. The portrait dates to a significant period in the artist’s career, during which Avery began a new professional affiliation with the famed dealer Paul Rosenberg. Encouraged by the abstract ideals of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, whom Rosenberg also represented, Avery deepened his handling of color while simultaneously refining and clarifying his own aesthetic.  According to Barbara Haskell, “Avery’s sudden arrival at his mature style was stimulated not only by Rosenberg, but also by the work of Picasso, which Avery looked at with renewed attention from the beginning of his affiliation with Rosenberg.  As with Matisse earlier, it was not the French artist’s imagery but his painting technique which impressed Avery.  Picasso had been represented exclusively by Rosenberg in Paris.  Among the 150-odd Picassos Rosenberg brought with him to New York were a number of canvases from the early thirties… The smooth surfaces of thinly modulated color divided by precise, but not hard, edges which Picasso had developed in this period particularly fascinated Avery, who had ample opportunity to study Picasso’s rich palette and his application techniques in the private showroom Rosenberg maintained on the second floor of his gallery.  Avery’s subsequent work resembled these Picassos both in the modulation of color and in the simplification of figures into geometric yet biomorphic shapes” (Milton Avery, New York, 1983, pp. 89, 92).

Portraiture always occupied a prominent place within Avery’s body of work. In 1919, while studying at the School of the Art Society of Hartford, he received top honors in both portrait and life-drawing class. For Avery,  these early drawings marked the beginning of his interest in the figure, and he explored the subject with growing sophistication throughout his career. The majority of Avery’s figures are female, often friends and family engaged in daily activities.  In the present work, Avery portrays art collector Sophie Sampliner, wife of Paul Sampliner, a co-owner of the celebrated D.C. Comics from 1937 to 1967. Sophie is shown seated on a high-backed chair with  her dog, Nicki, at her side.  The figure is rendered in shades of gold and cream, against a subtly painted background of soft yellow and gray.  While the next generation of artists, namely Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, ventured into complete abstraction, Avery typically strove to maintain a visual balance with representation. Barbara Haskell writes, “Avery’s approach opened new formal possibilities to American painting and exerted a profound influence on the group of younger artists whose work came to focus on the expressive potential of color.  Both Rothko and Newman saw in Avery’s disavowal of material paint deposits a way to make color evoke the sublime.  Throughout the forties both artists continued to turn to Avery’s work for inspiration…” (Ibid., p. 108).