|
 |
|
Milton Avery: The Late Paintings
2/16/2002 - 4/14/2002
Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, the first in depth examination
of the last years of the artist's long and celebrated career, will
bring together some 50 major works from public and private
collections in the United States and Europe. One of America's finest
and favorite modern painters, Milton Avery (1885-1965) pushed
representation to the border of abstraction with his witty, spare
and graceful style. Milton Avery: The Late Paintings will open on
February 16 and remain on view through April 14, 2002.
Until now, Milton Avery's career has been viewed as a monolithic
whole rather than a series of successive and distinct periods that
culminated in the paintings he produced during the last two decades
of his life. In this crucial final phase, Avery's experiments of the
1920s, 1930s and early 1940s coalesced into the increasingly
expansive canvases of the 1950s and 1960s, paintings characterized
by bold color and nearly abstract patterns of simplified form. But
while Avery's style may have changed and the scale of his work may
have grown, his art remained rooted in the same familiar, domestic
and comfortable subject matter that had been his hallmark for
decades.
The earliest works in the exhibition date from 1947, the year of
Avery's first retrospective, which he affectionately titled My
Daughter, March. In that show, held at the Durand-Ruel Galleries in
New York, Avery charted his artistic development alongside the
maturation of his only child, whose likeness he had recorded in many
of his most appealing canvases. Avery's devotion to his family and
capacity for self-examination is evident in one of the first works
in The Late Paintings, his 1947 self-portrait. Surrounded in his
studio by paintings of his daughter, Avery stands before a mirror,
paintbrush in hand, taking stock of his life and his
accomplishments. This deceptively daring self-portrait initiates
Avery's remarkable last period, when he personalized and trumped
tradition by transposing into a modernist key a number of artistic
genres, including nudes, still lifes, domestic interiors, and
seascapes. In each of these genres Avery tackled tradition with a
dry laconic wit, making each painting appear effortless; more like
an act of good fortune than an act of artistic defiance.
Avery's late paintings, seemingly light-hearted meditations on
life's many pleasures, are in fact powerful expressions of the
importance of family, the beauty of the natural world and the
fundamental truths that only great art can describe. Avery's ability
to crystallize experience and to capture life's evanescence and
contingency is revealed in the fifty canvases from 1947 to 1963 that
make up The Late Paintings.
A fully-illustrated catalogue, featuring an essay by Professor
Robert Hobbs that examines the philosophical underpinnings of Milton
Avery's style, accompanies the exhibition and will be available in
the Museum Store.
Milton Avery: The Late Paintings is organized by the American
Federation of Arts. Support has been provided by the National
Patrons of the AFA. Additional support is provided by the Riva Yares
Gallery Foundation. The local presentation of this exhibition has
been generously underwritten in part by The Liman Foundation with
additional support from Elizabeth Richebourg Rea and the Michael M.
Rea Endowment for Special Exhibitions. Media support is provided by
Adelphia Media Services. Once this exhibition closes at the Norton
Museum of Art it will travel to the UCLA Hammer Museum where it will
be on view from May 21 to August 18, 2002.
|
 |
| |
 |
|
|
The Norton Museum
of Art is a major cultural attraction in Florida.
The Museum is internationally known for its distinguished permanent
collection featuring
19th and 20th century European and American art, Chinese, contemporary art and photography.
From its founding the Norton has been famous for its masterpieces
of 19th century and 20th century painting
and sculpture by European artists such as Brancusi, Gauguin, Matisse,
Miró, Monet, Picasso
and by Americans such as Davis, Hassam, Hopper, Manship, O'Keeffe,
Pollock and Sheeler.
View special exhibitions and attend lectures and exhibition programs
for both children and adults.
THE NORTON MUSEUM OF ART
1451 S Olive Avenue, West Palm Beach FL 33401 Florida
The contents of this site, including all images and text, are for personal,
educational, noncommercial use only and may not be reproduced in any
form without the express permission of the Norton Museum of Art
site by tangled spider
|
