Milton Avery painted ordinary things: his wife sketching, a rooster, a speedboat’s wake, a strip of dunes under a blue sky. What makes the pictures memorable is how little is in them. A beach becomes three bands of colour; a figure becomes one shape with no modelling at all. Each area is close in value to its neighbour, so the picture holds together through hue rather than through light and shade. Painters such as Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb were regular visitors to his home, and his way of thinking in flat colour is directly useful to anyone who designs with a limited palette.
A note on images: none of the Milton Avery works held by the Art Institute of Chicago or the Metropolitan Museum of Art is flagged public domain, and the Cleveland Museum of Art lists its Avery works as copyrighted, so this guide describes his work in text only. For prints that are cleared for reuse, browse the woodcut collection in the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Milton Avery?
Avery was born on 7 March 1885 in Sand Bank, now Altmar, in upstate New York, and grew up near Hartford, Connecticut. The National Gallery of Art dates the family’s move to Hartford to 1898; the gallery Victoria Miro gives 1905. He worked factory jobs while taking classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students, where one account says he first enrolled in a lettering course, and in 1915 he showed his first painting in the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Annex Gallery, according to the Atheneum.
In 1924, or 1925 in some accounts, he met the artist Sally Michel in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and moved to New York to be near her; they married in 1926. Her work as an illustrator helped support the household and let him paint, as the Smithsonian American Art Museum and other biographies note. Their daughter, March Avery, born in 1932, became a painter and one of his frequent models. In New York he attended sketch classes at the Art Students League, and the circle around him included Rothko, Gottlieb and Barnett Newman.
The American Federation of Arts organised a retrospective that opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1960. He died in New York on 3 January 1965. At the memorial on 7 January, Rothko called him a “poet-inventor” whose work had sounded notes never heard before, in a speech later reprinted by the Cape Ann Museum and others.
A career in key works
Steeplechase, 1929. An early oil in the Met, dated a few years after the move to New York and before his colour areas became fully flat.
Drypoints, 1930s. Avery made a steady run of small drypoints: Sleeping Baby (1933), Drawbridge (1936), Self-Portrait (1937) and Japanese Landscape (1937) are in the Met, and the Art Institute of Chicago holds Rothko with Pipe (1936) and Child Cutting (1936). The line is quick and economical, often a single contour.
Conversation in Studio and Sunburned Couple, 1943. Two oils in the Art Institute of Chicago from the decade when his colour areas flattened out. The Met’s Dikran G. Kelekian (1943) shows the same approach in a portrait of the art dealer.
Swimmers and Sunbathers, 1945, and White Rooster, 1947. Both in the Met. Figures and birds become single shapes set against fields of sand, sea or ground.
Monotypes and woodcuts, 1950s. After a heart attack in 1949, recorded by the gallery Hirschl & Adler, he took up the monotype. The Met holds Birds and Ruffled Sea and Edge of the Forest (both 1951) and the colour monotype Grazing Animal (1951), along with woodcuts including Three Birds (1952), Fantail Pigeon (1953), Sailboat (1954) and Birds and Sea (1955).
Green Sea, 1954, and Sea Grasses and Blue Sea, 1958. In the late seascapes the shapes grow larger and fewer. The Museum of Modern Art notes that the 1958 canvas is based on his memories of Provincetown, Massachusetts, with the sky reduced to a narrow blue band along the top edge.
Speedboat’s Wake, 1959, and Blue Bay, 1960. Late oils in the Met and the Cleveland Museum of Art; water, boats and shoreline dominate his last decade.
What to look at in a Milton Avery painting
Shapes that lock together. Avery’s pictures are built like a jigsaw. A figure, a chair, a patch of floor and a wall are each one shape, and the edges meet without outlines. Look for how few shapes there are; in the late seascapes there may be only three or four.
Close values, different hues. Many of his colour pairs are near each other in lightness: a pink beside an ochre, a green beside a blue. That keeps the surface flat and makes the hue do the work. Squint at a reproduction and the shapes nearly merge.
Little or no shading. Faces are often left blank or given a single mark. Volume comes from silhouette, not from light and shadow.
Texture inside the flat. Up close, each colour area is not a solid block. The Whitney describes him treating oil like watercolour, in several thin layers of diluted wash, and other accounts note that he rubbed the canvas with a rag to vary the layers inside each shape.
Milton Avery’s technique: thin layers and simplification
- From thick to thin. After moving to New York he gave up an impasto, palette-knife approach and began to brush pigment on in thin layers, a shift described in museum and gallery biographies.
- Working from sketches. He drew constantly, and the Met holds pencil studies such as Study for Portrait of Dikran Kelekian (about 1943). The paintings simplify what the drawings record.
- Monotype. Printing a single impression from a painted plate encourages broad, quick areas of colour, and one account links his late wash technique to the monotypes he made around 1950.
- Woodcut. Cutting a block favours big, simple shapes, and the titles of his 1950s woodcuts (birds, a pigeon, a sailboat, the sea) match the pared-down subjects of the paintings.
How designers can borrow Milton Avery’s ideas
- Count your shapes. Try to build an illustration or a hero image from five shapes or fewer. If it still reads, you have the essential version.
- Match values, vary hues. Build a palette where several colours sit at similar lightness. Check it in greyscale: if the shapes nearly vanish, you have Avery’s calm, flat effect. Remember to keep enough contrast for any text placed on top.
- Use bands for space. A landscape layout of three horizontal colour bands (sky, sea, sand) makes a strong banner, section header or packaging wrap.
- Add texture inside flat colour. A subtle grain, wash or print texture inside each flat area keeps a minimal design from feeling sterile.
- Drop the outlines. Let colour edges meet directly instead of drawing a keyline around each shape.
Our colour palette generator is a quick way to test close-value schemes, and our guide to vintage colour palettes collects mid-century combinations. Avery’s paintings and prints are in copyright, so borrow the principles and make your own images.
Where to see Milton Avery’s work
The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a broad group, from Steeplechase (1929) to Speedboat’s Wake (1959), plus many prints. The Art Institute of Chicago holds Conversation in Studio and Sunburned Couple; the Cleveland Museum of Art holds Blue Bay, Studious Sketcher (1944–45) and Farm Yard (1948); MoMA holds Sea Grasses and Blue Sea. A retrospective organised by the Royal Academy of Arts with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Wadsworth Atheneum toured all three in 2021–22; in London it was titled Milton Avery: American Colourist and was billed as his first show in a European public institution.
Frequently asked questions
What is Milton Avery known for?
He is known for paintings of beaches, interiors, portraits and landscapes reduced to flat, interlocking shapes of carefully balanced colour, and for his drypoints, woodcuts and monotypes.
How did Milton Avery influence Mark Rothko?
Rothko and Gottlieb were frequent visitors to Avery’s apartment in New York and sought his views on their work. Rothko spoke at Avery’s memorial in 1965 and praised him as a “poet-inventor”. Avery’s flat colour areas are often cited as a precursor to colour field painting.
What technique did Milton Avery use?
After settling in New York he applied oil paint in thin, diluted layers, close to watercolour, and sometimes rubbed the surface with a rag to vary the colour within each shape. In prints he used drypoint, woodcut and monotype.
Can I use Milton Avery’s work in my designs?
No. He died in 1965 and his paintings and prints are in copyright; none of the works in the Met, Art Institute of Chicago or Cleveland collections is flagged public domain. Learn from his colour and composition, but create your own images.
