Milton Avery

Milton Clark Avery was born on March 7, 1885 in Sand Bank (now Altmar), New York, and moved with his family to East Hartford, Connecticut, in 1898. He left school at sixteen to work in a factory, taking evening classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students after a lettering class he had signed up for was cancelled. He continued in night classes at the School of the Art Society of Hartford for nearly two decades while supporting his family with day jobs.

He moved to New York City in 1925 after marrying the illustrator Sally Michel, whose commercial work supported the household for years and freed him to paint full-time. The couple settled in Greenwich Village and had one daughter, March, born in 1932. He befriended a younger generation of painters including Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman, who treated him as a mentor and a bridge between European modernism and what would become Abstract Expressionism.

His mature paintings, developed from the early 1930s onward, simplified figures, landscapes, and seascapes into broad flat areas of softly modulated color, drawing on Henri Matisse without ever crossing fully into abstraction. The Phillips Collection in Washington gave him a solo show in 1944 and Rosenberg Gallery represented him in New York. He suffered a serious heart attack in 1949 that limited his output but pushed his color toward greater simplification.

The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a retrospective of his work in 1960. He died on January 3, 1965 in New York City. Rothko delivered the eulogy and later said Avery's work had given him "the courage to use color."

The name Milton comes from an Old English place-name combining myln ("mill") and tūn ("settlement, enclosure"), meaning "settlement by the mill." It became a surname and then a given name, and he carried it as a masculine given name traceable through the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton.