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Brimming with playful movement, Milton Avery’s Sea and Stars hovers between the representational and the abstract, the stars leaping over a wave in a melodic arc. Here, Avery elegantly distills the sea and sky into simplified forms. The painting was executed in 1951 as the artist faced major changes in his career, resulting in a dramatic evolution of both style and technique. One of the greatest American Modernists in history, Avery’s commitment to the representational differentiated him from the Abstract Expressionists. And yet, he also stood apart from the American scene painters of the 1930s, often simplifying his landscapes to biomorphic forms and foregoing spatial perspective. In Sea and Stars, what may first be perceived as a cloud is revealed to be, upon closer inspection, the titular sea, positioned so high on the horizon that the wave appears to almost touch the moon itself.
"I like to seize the one sharp instant in nature, to imprison it by means of ordered shapes and space relationships. To this end I eliminate and simplify, leaving apparently nothing but color and pattern. I am not seeking pure abstraction; rather the purity and essence of the idea—expressed in its simplest form."
—Milton Avery
Mark Rothko, Green on Blue (Earth-Green and White), 1954, The University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York The 1950s marked a transition in Avery’s style, as he began to distance himself from the works of Henri Matisse and French Fauvism. During the mid 1940s, Avery joined the prestigious Paul Rosenberg & Co., which at the time represented major European artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques. A few years later, the artist suffered from a debilitating heart attack in 1949 and left Paul Rosenberg & Co. in 1950. While recovering from his heart attack, he began to experiment with monotype printing, as he was too weak to paint. He would rapidly produce prints in quick succession, applying thin pigments to a surface, often printing the image while it was still wet. Elements of these printing techniques are echoed in the transparency of pigment in Sea and Stars. This is seen most clearly in the gestural blue-grey coat of paint softening the borders of the composition, akin to Mark Rothko’s color fields. As Robert Hobbs stated of Avery’s late paintings like this work, “There is a lyric intensity in the landscape and seascape paintings of Avery’s last period that is unlike anything else in the art of our time. As in the late paintings of Cézanne and Matisse, many of these pictures are characterized by an inspired concision, as if the painter were attempting to summarize and quintessentialize everything that he knew and felt and wanted to see realized in painting.”
來源
舊金山 Paule Anglim 畫廊
私人收藏（1992年購自上述來源）
紐約，蘇富比，1995 年 9 月 14 日，拍品編號 234
現藏者購自上述拍賣過往展覽
New York, Grace Borgenicht Gallery, Summer 1991
New York, Grace Borgenicht Gallery, Sun and Moon Paintings, January 4–February 1 1992, n.p.文學
Holland Cotter, "Art in Review: Milton Avery," The New York Times, January 10, 1992, p. 72
重要美國東岸收藏
112
《大海與星》
款識：Milton Avery 1951（左下方）"SEA and STARS" by Milton Avery 1951（畫背）
油彩 畫布
34 1/8 x 38 1/8 英吋 (86.7 x 96.8 公分)
1951年作
估價
$200,000 - 400,000
成交價$352,800
John McCord
紐約日間拍賣主管（上午部分）暨資深專家
+1 212 940 1261
jmccord@phillips.com
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紐約拍賣2021年11月18日
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