ABSTRACT
The career of the American painter Milton Avery, who died on January 3, 1965, at the age of seventy-one, was one of the most astonishing in the art of his time. Avery was one of the purest painters of the twentieth century, not only in America but anywhere, and his work remains even now a miracle of untroubled clarity and lyric grace. There is nothing in his art to startle the modern observer except its amazing, unviolated calm and the extraordinary confidence that made it possible. A typical picture by Avery is rather like a very spare jigsaw puzzle in which a very few flat shapes are locked into a rigorously conceived design. Avery was the kind of painter who based his large finished pictures on copious drawings and watercolors, and in the process of composition clarified both structure and color to their very essence.
