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Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Milton Avery, High Dune, 1961

Milton Avery American, 1885-1965

High Dune, 1961
Oil on canvas board
16 x 20 inches
40.6 x 50.8 cm
Signed and dated at lower left: Milton Avery 1961; inscribed indistinctly at lower right; signed, dated, and inscribed with title on verso: "High Dune" / by / Milton Avery / 16 x 20 / 1961
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Milton Avery’s High Dune exemplifies “the light, airy, daringly simplified…abstract paintings of sand, sea and sky,” of the artist’s last decade, as New York Times critic Roberta Smith described in...
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Milton Avery’s High Dune exemplifies “the light, airy, daringly simplified…abstract paintings of sand, sea and sky,” of the artist’s last decade, as New York Times critic Roberta Smith described in her review of the 2021-22 international traveling retrospective organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth [1]. Avery used color to activate the power of emotion tied to a particular sense of place. In High Dune, he stacked muted bands of peach, black, and tan hues to represent the soft shore, vast sea, and clear sky. Without the descriptive title, however, this composition reveals itself to be distinctly abstract and lacking a narrative element entirely. This period represents the pinnacle of Avery’s refinement of a singular creative vision informed by the deep emotive power of place and memory, yet anticipatory of larger shifts in twentieth-century modernism toward the sweeping abstraction of Color Field painting emerging in the late 1950s.


[1] Roberta Smith, “A Singular American Painter and His Perennially Disregarded Wife,” New York Times, May 12, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/arts/design/milton-avery-wadsworth-museum.html

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Provenance

The artist; to

Private collection, Woodstock, Vermont, 1964-65; to

The estate of the above until 2024; to

The present owner

Exhibitions

Park Gallery, Detroit, Michigan, Paintings by Milton Avery, January 7-27, 1962, no. 13
Hawthorne Gallery, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Massachusetts, Milton Avery Memorial Exhibition—Second 1966 Show, August 4-September 5, 1966, p. 24

Literature

Joy Hankanson, "Art in Michigan: Frugal Magic of a Yankee Painter," Detroit News, December 31, 1961, p. 11-B
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