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