Sleeping Bather

Known for his modernist depictions of the people and places of his immediate surroundings, Milton Avery fueled his artistic imagination with annual summer trips to destinations such as Woodstock, Gloucester, Vermont and importantly, Provincetown, where he visited repeatedly in the early 1960s and worked alongside fellow artists Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. Painted in 1963, Sleeping Bather combines Avery’s two most important subjects, the figure and the seascape, into one semi-abstracted image of a beautiful summer day on the coast. Executed with his distinctive approach to representation bordering on abstraction, the present work bears the hallmarks of Avery’s celebrated style that inspired the world’s foremost post-war artists.

Described as America’s greatest colorist, or simply put, the “American Fauve,” Avery stylistically simplified and reduced his subjects throughout his career. Artist Hans Hofmann maintained that “Avery was one of the first to understand color as a creative means. He was one of the first to relate colors in a plastic way. His color actually achieves a life of its own, sometimes lovely and gentle, at other times startlingly tart, yet always subtle and eloquent." (as quoted in Milton Avery, Manchester, Vermont, 1990, p. 1) Indeed, Sleeping Bather typifies the artist’s instinctual approach to color with its extraordinary variations in warm and cool tones. The artist denotes the sea with a large plain of teal pigment painted with wonderfully energetic brushwork and texture, which is offset by stunning forms of pink, red and electric chartreuse. This expressive use of color and form exemplifies Avery’s legacy as an inspiration across the genres of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field and representational painting.