Milton Avery (1885-1965) was one of the most poetic and quietly influential American painters of the twentieth century, an artist whose distinctive approach to color and simplified form shaped a generation of younger painters that would go on to define postwar American art. Born in Altmar, New York, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, Avery worked a series of jobs to support himself while attending classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students, an unusually long and self-directed apprenticeship that shaped his lifelong commitment to a personal, hard-won visual language.

In 1926, Avery married the painter Sally Michel, whose income as an illustrator allowed him to devote himself full-time to painting, and the couple's small New York apartment became a gathering place for a remarkable circle of younger artists. Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman were among his closest friends, and Rothko famously described Avery as "the great poet-inventor" whose reduction of landscape and figure to essential planes of luminous color pointed the way toward the color-field breakthroughs of the following generation.

Avery's mature work is grounded in his characteristic vocabulary of flattened, expressive shapes and unusual, harmonically resolved color relationships. His subjects range across landscapes, seascapes, intimate domestic scenes, and portraits of his family, including the celebrated pictures of his daughter, the painter March Avery. Represented during his career by leading galleries including Paul Rosenberg, he received a major Whitney retrospective in 1960. His paintings are held in the permanent collections of the leading American museums, where they remain among the defining images of American modernist painting.