Footnotes

Provenance
The artist.
Estate of the above, 1965.
The Harmon Gallery, Naples, Florida.
Dr. and Mrs. Robert H. Barter, Washington, D.C., acquired from the above, January 1982.
Mrs. Joanne Barter West, Washington, D.C., by descent, 1999.
By descent to the present owners, 2020.

Exhibited
Naples, Florida, The Harmon Gallery, Milton Avery Retrospective: Paintings, Drawings, Graphics, March 14-April 3, 1982, pp. 7, 11, no. 27, illustrated, and elsewhere. (as Sunflower)

This lot is accompanied by a letter from the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, New York.

Sunflowers is a strong example of a classic still life subject interpreted through Milton Avery's mature style of the 1960s. At this stage in his career, Avery's pictorial focus shifted almost entirely from describing the individual parts of his subjects to instead focusing on a harmony among the composition's elements. Avery began exploring ways to create compositional harmony through the simplification of shape and reduction of detail as early as 1944, but by the 1950s and onward, he mastered this vision that allowed him to achieve balance and to better express more universal qualities of experience. Avery's spectacular ability to handle and control color has been appreciated by his fellow artists and critics, but unlike his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, Avery never fully relinquished elements of representation. Instead, as in Sunflowers, Avery combined his engagement with aesthetic issues of his time with his loyalty to the observed subject.

Many significant, avant-garde artists found inspiration in sunflowers as a subject, from Henri Matisse (1869-1954) to Avery's fellow American Modernist, Joseph Stella (1877-1946), and most famously by Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890). The visual contrast of colors and shapes found in sunflowers, with their thin, pointed golden petals set against a large, round, dark center, appealed to Avery as well and suited his pictorial style of abstraction. In 1957, Avery explored the present work's composition in a related work on paper (whereabouts unknown) and in 1963, he returned to it in in oil. Still life painting was a genre Avery would return to throughout his career as the artist employed his modern pictorial devices to everyday objects and floral arrangements. The artist's wife and fellow artist, Sally Michel Avery (1902-2003), reminisced on the inspiration he found from objects, "Shapes regular and irregular, colors strong or tender, relationships odd or familiar all held a fascination for Milton. So it was a stroke of luck to find in a house we rented one summer a huge collection of Victorian objects and furniture. Vases with frilly edges and fanciful handles, chairs with intricate carvings and twisted arms all begging to be portrayed... At all times there were flowers. Wine dark anemones and pale lavender lilacs, white and yellow daises paired with glass animals from his daughter's glass menagerie. At other times pottery animals made by March served as models." (as quoted in Milton Avery: Still Life Paintings, 1988, n.p.)

In the present work, Avery has deconstructed the sunflowers, vase, and table so they serve as both simplified abstract forms and as referential objects. The deep green leaves are handled in a similar tone to the vase and allow the bold blooms above to jubilantly dominate the composition. The setting of the yellow flowers against the complimentary hue of violet in the background creates a vibrant contrast. The artist's mature painting technique is evident in the work's execution. Avery incorporated thin washes of paint, sometimes one over the other, to create textural, veiled strokes of color, while the centers of the flowers include organically curved lines of his hallmark scratch-work in the painted surface.

In Sunflowers, Avery masterfully evokes a tenderness for a familiar motif and celebrates our relationship with life's simple pleasures while still successfully concentrating on the painting's purely visual properties, specifically color and shape. In Avery's final years, he continued to paint as long as he could, living by his own credo to "keep painting - day in, day out. Be absorbed by it. Hold on to the dream - try to make the great dream a reality." (as quoted in Contemporary American Paintings and Sculpture, 1959, p. 192) After his passing in early-1965, the rising generation of American color painters would look toward Avery's achievements with admiration and for inspiration, making his work eternal. Avery's color harmonies and relationships between his simplified forms, as exhibited in Sunflowers, continue to remain captivating and fresh.