This late work by Milton Avery is emblematic of the American painter’s greatest strengths and reflects the refined modernist aesthetic that the artist cultivated throughout his long lasting and illustrious career. Bordering on abstraction, Bird with Choppy Sea’s dramatic reduction and blunt fattening of form is expertly paired with a simple yet
luminous color scheme of contrasting hues. The powerful diagonal of the bird’s body and the shimmering rhythm of the brush strokes representing the sea together give a dynamic energy to the work that speaks to Avery’s mastery of the medium. Although trained in the environs of New York, Avery completely absorbed the color techniques of the European historical avant-garde. Avery’s paintings can be seen as an American response to the works by French Fauvist Henri Matisse and German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

Recognized for decades as forerunners of American abstract art, Avery’s works are part of the public collections of numerous major art institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Whitney Museum, The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. Indeed, Avery’s brilliant color schemes, brush strokes of form, and elimination of perspectival space have had an undeniable impact on later American painters, most notably the Color Field generation. “What was Avery’s repertoire?,” the artist’s friend and celebrated painter Mark Rothko explained, “His living room, Central Park, his wife Sally, his daughter March, the beaches and mountains where they summered; cows, fish heads, the fight of birds; his friends and whatever world strayed through his studio: a domestic, unheroic cast. But from these there have been fashioned great canvases, that far from the casual and transitory implications of the subjects, have always a gripping lyricism, and often achieve the permanence and monumentality of Egypt.”