Modernist Painter Milton Avery's Little-Known Illustrations and Prints on Display at The New York Public Library

Avery's Original Gouache Paintings for a Children's Book on View for First Time

February 14, 2005 -- One of the foremost modernist American painters, Milton Avery (1885-1965) produced nearly 60 drypoints, lithographs, and woodcuts in sporadic periods from 1933 to 1963. And in 1946, at the instigation of his friend, painter Mark Rothko, Avery created his only illustrations, a set of eight witty and colorful gouache paintings for a children's book, unpublished during the artist's lifetime. From February 18 through May 27, 2005, The New York Public Library will present Milton Avery: The Flying Pig and Other Winged Creatures--An Exhibition of the Artist's Illustrations and Prints, featuring a selection of Avery's prints, acquired for the Print Collection from 1948 to 2004, along with the original illustrations for a children's book. The illustrations, which came to the Library's Spencer Collection in 2001 through the generosity of Milton Avery's family, are being exhibited publicly for the first time. The exhibition is on view in the Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Admission is free.

Avery's paintings are widely appreciated for their unique interplay of abstracted shapes from nature and lyrical color harmonies. Born in Altmar, New York, the artist spent his early years in or near East Hartford, Connecticut, where he began a lengthy apprenticeship as a painter in search of an individual style. In 1925 he moved to New York and first became fully aware of modernist masters such as Picasso, Braque, and especially Matisse, from whom he probably adapted his own new ways of dispensing with illusionistic modeling as well as with literally descriptive colors. With growing success, Avery patiently developed his art over the course of his long career. He finally arrived at what has come to be seen as a grand late style, characterized in his paintings by an extreme paring down to the most essential forms carefully constructed within perfectly balanced, large-scale compositions.

Avery's art has also long been acknowledged as influential for the creation of certain styles by the younger generation of Abstract Expressionists, perhaps most evident in paintings by Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, and for the examples his heightened, luminous colors may have provided in the formation of Color Field painting in the 1950s and 1960s. In the eulogy he delivered at his friend's memorial service in 1965, Mark Rothko said, "Avery is first a great poet…There have been several others in our generation who have celebrated the world around them, but none with that inevitability where the poetry penetrates ever pore of the canvas to the ver last tip of the brush."

This exhibition presents two far-too-little-known aspects of Milton Avery's art, in a selection of twelve of his drypoints and woodcuts, acquired by the Library's Print Collection from 1948 to 2004, and in a set of gouache paintings made for a children's book in 1946, acquired by the Spencer Collection in 2001. The painted illustrations represent a storytelling mode not seen in any other works by Avery and are the only instance in which he produced a series of pictures to accompany a text. They remained unpublished until 1994 when Avery's daughter March Avery Cavanaugh invited her lifelong friend, children's author Karla Kuskin, to write a new story to coincide with the original narrative sequence of the images. Featuring scenes with a boy, a flying pink pig, a giant caterpillar, a flying fish, a singing cat, howling wolves, and a reindeer, the resulting book, entitled Paul, is the story of a boy whose parents are too busy to listen to him sing his song. The illustrations, along with Karla Kuskin's story, are scheduled for republication in 2005 under a new title, The Flying Pig and Other Winged Creatures. The illustrations are shown here publicly for the first time.

"Milton Avery's approach to printmaking was hands-on and direct without much concern for complicated techniques," said Robert Rainwater, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Chief Librarian of Art, Prints and Photographs, Curator of the Spencer Collection and organizer of the exhibition. "Even though he was known as a great colorist in his paintings and watercolors, his palette in his prints, however, was largely limited to black and white, with the frequent addition of a single primary color in the woodcuts, all of which were printed without the aid of a press by the artist himself."

Acquisition of Milton Avery's illustrations in 2001 by the Library's Spencer Collection was made possible as the partial gift of Sally Michel Avery, courtesy Milton Avery Trust and Knoedler & Co., New York.

Milton Avery: The Flying Pig and Other Winged Creatures – An Exhibition of the Artist's Illustrations and Prints is on view February 18 through May 27, 2005, in the Stokes Gallery on the third floor of The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Exhibition hours are: Tuesday and Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Mondays and national holidays. Admission is free. For more information about exhibitions at The New York Public Library, the public may call 212-869-8089 or visit the Library's website at www.nypl.org

This exhibition has been made possible by the continuing generosity of Miriam and Ira D. Wallach.

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Contact: Herb Scher 212.704-8600.