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, April 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, p. 11, no. 8, and elsewhere.

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

Milton Avery repeatedly returned to the subject of the American landscape, exploring its hills, fields, and shores in a progressively abstracted manner as his career progressed. Spring Landscape is a superb example of Avery's ability to compose powerful landscapes and an early attempt to reduce the natural environment into an arrangement of color-field shapes. Avery would write in his later years, "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." (as quoted in R. Hobbs, Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, New York, 2001, p. 53) Spring Landscape is identifiable as a landscape with recognizable elements, such as the trees painted in dark shades of green with demarcating lines to represent branches and rocks in dark streaks of grey, yet the scene is inherently abstract, as Avery has interpreted more so than transcribed these shapes from nature. As a result, these forms represent both familiar elements and planes of pure color that come together to create a synthetic harmony that characterizes the work as uniquely Avery. Fundamental to his style, the pictorial space has been condensed into a flattened two-dimensional plane. His wife Sally explained in an interview, "Milton's idea of painting was really quite different...He was interested in a flat surface and he used color as a means of expression. He was completely disinterested in photographic depth or mushy painting." (as quoted in T. Wolf, Interview with Sally Avery, New York, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, February 19 and March 19, 1982)