Milton Avery: The Late Portraits

Victoria Miro presents an exhibition of portraits from the last four years of Milton Avery’s life (1885–1965) .

Throughout his career, Avery’s habit was to devote his summers to drawing and making watercolours, which would serve as the basis for the oil paintings he worked on during the winters back in New York – a routine that goes some way in explaining his art’s sense of endless summer. Conciseness, so often a mark of an artist’s late style, can be aligned here with practical necessity. The latter years of Avery’s life saw the artist increasingly confined to his apartment and studio on Central Park West, rarely venturing outside except for occasional walks in Central Park. This is the likely location, greatly simplified to planes of ochre and green, of the self-portrait painting Milton Avery, 1961.