Skip to main content
Dune Bushes
Artist
Milton Avery
(Born 1885, United States; died 1965, United States)
Date1958
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 54 1/8 x 65 7/8 x 1 1/4 in. (137.48 x 167.32 x 3.18 cm)
Framed: 58 7/8 x 70 5/8 x 1 1/4 in. (149.54 x 179.39 x 3.18 cm)
Framed: 58 7/8 x 70 5/8 x 1 1/4 in. (149.54 x 179.39 x 3.18 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase, William E. Scott Foundation by Exchange
Object number1989.21
Status
Not on viewSignedrecto, l.l.c., "Milton Avery 1958"
Copyright© The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation
Category
Label TextThroughout the 1910s and 1920s, Milton Avery lived and studied art in Connecticut, where he produced portraits and small impressionist landscapes. By the mid-1920s, he had moved to New York, had his first exhibition there, and met the artists Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, who became his close friends. During the next two decades, Avery’s watercolors, oils, and prints were exhibited widely. In around 1949, he experimented with the monotype, a printmaking medium of directness and fluidity. He soon incorporated these qualities, along with a greater simplicity, in his paintings. Another significant change in his art occurred during the four summers from 1957 to 1960 that he spent in Provincetown, Massachusetts, when he moved to working on much larger canvases.
The painting Dune Bushes, 1958, derives from a sketch, also in the Modern’s extensive Avery holdings, that the artist made during his Provincetown summers. The ink-on-paper study evinces the immediacy with which Avery perceived the sandy landscapes and the rapidity with which he recorded his impressions of it. The finished oil painting shows his skill at distilling the scene. Dune Bushes’s lightness, freshness, and delicacy of color are hallmarks of Avery’s art. As he eliminated and simplified forms, he pushed his imagery to the very edge of abstraction. Yet here and in his other works, he remained resolutely committed to conveying the look, as well as the feeling, of nature.
The painting Dune Bushes, 1958, derives from a sketch, also in the Modern’s extensive Avery holdings, that the artist made during his Provincetown summers. The ink-on-paper study evinces the immediacy with which Avery perceived the sandy landscapes and the rapidity with which he recorded his impressions of it. The finished oil painting shows his skill at distilling the scene. Dune Bushes’s lightness, freshness, and delicacy of color are hallmarks of Avery’s art. As he eliminated and simplified forms, he pushed his imagery to the very edge of abstraction. Yet here and in his other works, he remained resolutely committed to conveying the look, as well as the feeling, of nature.