Milton Avery

Milton Avery (March 7, 1885 - January 3, 1965) was an American painter whose works specialize in American Modernism. Although born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to Maine.

He supported himself with factory jobs and lived in obscurity. In 1917 he began working at night in order to paint in the daytime. Roy Neuberger saw his work and thought he deserved recognition. Determined to get the world to know and respect Avery's work, Neuberger bought over 100 of his paintings, starting with Gaspé Landscape, and lent or donated them to museums all over the world. With the work of Milton Avery rotating through high-profile museums, he came to be a highly respected and successful painter.
Avery's work is seminal to American abstract painting-while his work is clearly representational, it focuses on color relations rather than creating the illusion of depth as Western painting since the Renaissance has. Early in his career his work was considered too radical for being too abstract; when Abstract Expressionism became dominant his work was overlooked, as being too representational. He befriended Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko.