Milton Avery has been described as a gentle, quiet, unassuming man who disliked publicity, cared little for talking about himself or his work, affiliated with no groups, and championed no issues or causes -- save for his painting, to which he was thoroughly committed. His only apparent "act of vanity," as Robert Hughes politely puts it, was subtracting eight years from his actual age so he would not seem "too old" to young art student Sally Michel, whom he had met in 1924, fallen in love with, courted, and married two years later. He perpetuated the erroneous birthdate for the remainder of his life. The deception was uncovered when Whitney Museum curator Barbara Haskell was studying the artist's life in preparation for that institution's monumental 1982 retrospective exhibition.

The Averys had just one child, a daughter whom they named March, born in 1931. She is the subject of both Avery paintings in the Hunter Museum collection. The earlier and more realistic Young Girl in Blue of 1939 was painted when the dark-eyed March would have been between six and seven years old, though she appears slightly younger perhaps. It is a charming and wistful study in subdued tones of predominantly grey, umber, and, of course, blue. March by the Sea was painted six years later when Avery's style had evolved to the bold, simplified, geometric compositions that characterize his mature and better known work. Obviously it is of little consequence that the viewer recognize the figure as the artist's daughter.

Both works reveal Avery's debt to earlier movements in European expressionism, especially the fauves and Henri Matisse, with whom he is often compared. In a statement that might readily be taken as by Matisse, Avery explained:

I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea.

Like Matisse, Avery's work always involves recognizable -- though highly abstracted -- objects, decorative compositional arrangement, and carefully balanced color. Yet typically his designs are, by comparison, reduced even further. Essential shapes and large fields of flat, delicately modulated tonalities result in what Dore Ashton calls his "grandeur of sparsely designed surfaces."

Avery was born in 1885 in Altmar, New York, where he lived till his early teens, when the family moved to Hartford, Connecticut. He studied intermittently over a period of twenty years at the Connecticut League of Artists and the Art Society of Hartford, at the same time holding jobs variously in business, manufacturing, and construction. In 1925, at age forty, he moved to New York, chiefly to be near his future wife. It was not until then that he pursued his career as an artist full time. Recognition came very slowly. Critics tended to see his work as always out-of-step with the current avant-garde. He was not like the regionalists and social realists of the '30s, even less like the "gesture" abstractionists of the '40s and '50s. He had his first major retrospective show at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1952. The Whitney Museum presented an updated retrospective in 1960. Avery's last years were marked by failing and debilitating health. He suffered serious heart attacks in 1949 and 1960; from the latter he never fully recovered. He was hospitalized the final nine months of his life and died January 3, 1965. At the memorial service four days later his longtime close friend Mark Rothko spoke in fond tribute:

There have been several others in our generation who have celebrated the world around them, but none with that inevitability where the poetry penetrated every pore of the canvas to the very last touch of the brush. For Avery was a great poet-inventor who had invented sonorities never seen nor heard before. From these we have learned much and will learn more for a long time to come.