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Lot Essay
Painted in 1944, Umbrellas and Bathers was executed in a year of great artistic inspiration for Avery. Apart from being the most prolific year of the artist's career, 1944 proved to be a year of unusually abundant influence from Europe's top artists. Avery entered into a contractual agreement with gallery owner Paul Rosenberg, who added Avery to his roster of artists in 1944. Although the artist's association with dealer Valentine Dudensing was a successful and educational experience, a new contract with Rosenberg promised Avery guaranteed sales of at least 50 paintings a year.
This financial security and new business relationship allowed Avery a clear mind to paint avidly and provided newfound access to Europe's most avant-garde painters and their abstract ideas. Rosenberg had come to this country just four years earlier with a collection of great works by important European artists that provided Avery with a new understanding of abstract representation. As a result, Avery's work from the mid-40's and after has the distinctive character that we have come to associate with the Avery name.
Barbara Haskell has explained these influences, "Rosenberg's proclivity for taut structure and architectonic solidity encouraged Avery to emphasize these aspects of his work. He replaced the brushy paint application and graphic detailing that had informed his previous efforts with denser more evenly modulated areas of flattened color contained with crisply delineated forms. The result was a more abstract interlocking of shapes and a shallower pictorial space than he had previously employed. Avery retained color as the primary vehicle of feeling and expression, but achieved a greater degree of abstraction by increasing the parity between recognizable forms and abstract shapes." ("Milton Avery: The Metaphysics of Color," in Milton Avery: Paintings from the Collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, 1994, pp. 8-9)
Umbrellas and Bathers is an example of the artist expressing a mood of calm and serenity through his depiction of isolated groups of bathers relaxing on the beach with the ebb and flow of the tide. "Avery's genius lay in his ability to portray moods that stimulate each viewer's consciousness on an almost archetypal level. As the depiction of iconic relationships came to dominate his work. His paintings acquired greater poignancy. In relinquishing the transitory and the specific, Avery bestowed on his subjects a suspended calm. Depictions of group activities-family and friends playing games, making music, relaxing together at the beach-were replaced by a quality of separateness. Figure portrayals now generally of single figures or of couples isolated in otherwise deserted landscapes. This mood of emptiness and quietude extended to his landscapes and seascapes as well; even in these, pictorial incidents seldom intrude upon the limitless expanse of empty space." (B. Haskell, Milton Avery, New York, 1982, pp. 161 and 164)
Though Avery discounted any influence of Matisse, it is undeniable that Avery understood the way Matisse used simple broad shapes to create depth and why he preferred one flat color to the fussiness of blended shades. A few strokes of paint, applied with quick assuredness, may seem an unimportant device but like Matisse, Avery was highly aware that the success of a composition may hinge on one small decorative flourish.
This financial security and new business relationship allowed Avery a clear mind to paint avidly and provided newfound access to Europe's most avant-garde painters and their abstract ideas. Rosenberg had come to this country just four years earlier with a collection of great works by important European artists that provided Avery with a new understanding of abstract representation. As a result, Avery's work from the mid-40's and after has the distinctive character that we have come to associate with the Avery name.
Barbara Haskell has explained these influences, "Rosenberg's proclivity for taut structure and architectonic solidity encouraged Avery to emphasize these aspects of his work. He replaced the brushy paint application and graphic detailing that had informed his previous efforts with denser more evenly modulated areas of flattened color contained with crisply delineated forms. The result was a more abstract interlocking of shapes and a shallower pictorial space than he had previously employed. Avery retained color as the primary vehicle of feeling and expression, but achieved a greater degree of abstraction by increasing the parity between recognizable forms and abstract shapes." ("Milton Avery: The Metaphysics of Color," in Milton Avery: Paintings from the Collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, 1994, pp. 8-9)
Umbrellas and Bathers is an example of the artist expressing a mood of calm and serenity through his depiction of isolated groups of bathers relaxing on the beach with the ebb and flow of the tide. "Avery's genius lay in his ability to portray moods that stimulate each viewer's consciousness on an almost archetypal level. As the depiction of iconic relationships came to dominate his work. His paintings acquired greater poignancy. In relinquishing the transitory and the specific, Avery bestowed on his subjects a suspended calm. Depictions of group activities-family and friends playing games, making music, relaxing together at the beach-were replaced by a quality of separateness. Figure portrayals now generally of single figures or of couples isolated in otherwise deserted landscapes. This mood of emptiness and quietude extended to his landscapes and seascapes as well; even in these, pictorial incidents seldom intrude upon the limitless expanse of empty space." (B. Haskell, Milton Avery, New York, 1982, pp. 161 and 164)
Though Avery discounted any influence of Matisse, it is undeniable that Avery understood the way Matisse used simple broad shapes to create depth and why he preferred one flat color to the fussiness of blended shades. A few strokes of paint, applied with quick assuredness, may seem an unimportant device but like Matisse, Avery was highly aware that the success of a composition may hinge on one small decorative flourish.