Making Room for Milton Avery

For much of his career, Milton Avery occupied an awkward position within American modernism. During the 1930s, as Social Realism dominated New York exhibitions and government-sponsored art programmes, he was repeatedly urged by dealers, critics and acquaintances to adopt a more explicit narrative language that addressed the crises of the Great Depression. At the same time, as close friends such as Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko moved decisively towards abstraction, others encouraged him to abandon figuration altogether. Avery resisted both pressures.

According to his daughter March, herself an artist, the family’s social circle lay far from the financial centres of the artworld. ‘They weren’t hanging out with bond traders,’ she later recalled. Instead, artists including Rothko were frequent visitors to the Avery household, even as Avery declined to follow them into abstraction. When Rothko later credited Avery as a formative influence on his mature Colour Field painting, the acknowledgement only reinforced the sense that Avery had remained out of step with the trajectories that would come to define postwar American art.

Rather than align himself with either realism or abstraction, Avery continued to paint domestic and everyday scenes: his wife Sally sewing, bathers on Cape Cod beaches, solitary figures in brownstones, even his daughter’s toy alligator. He reduced these subjects to broad, often unnatural fields of colour and simplified forms that satisfied neither political nor formal orthodoxies. Dunsing Valentine, the influential Midtown dealer who introduced Matisse to wealthy uptown collectors, reportedly complained that Avery’s paintings were ‘neither political enough nor modern enough’ – a judgement Avery took as confirmation rather than rebuke.

This marginal position shaped Avery’s professional life. For decades, he supported himself with a day job at the Museum of Modern Art’s circulation desk, painting in the evenings and at weekends. That long-standing marginality makes the scale and timing of Avery’s re-evaluation over the past decade particularly striking.

A decisive institutional signal came in 2022, when Edith Devaney curated Avery’s first European retrospective at the Royal Academy in London. Framed as an ‘American colourist’, Avery was presented as an artist who found revelation in ordinary life. Rothko’s description of Avery’s painting as ‘[penetrating] every pore of the canvas to the very last touch of the brush’ featured prominently, while Laura Cumming, reviewing the exhibition in The Guardian, praised Avery as ‘a man of pure, exultant colour’ whose palette ‘works on you in mysterious ways’.

Devaney returned to Avery’s work in October 2025 with a more speculative exhibition at Malta International Contemporary Arts Space (MICAS), pairing his paintings with those of seven contemporary artists: Harold Ancart, Henni Alftan, March Avery, Andrew Cranston, Gary Hume, Nicolas Party and Jonas Wood. Rather than rehearse a full career survey, the exhibition invited each artist to articulate a personal – intellectual or emotional – connection to Avery’s work, allowing his influence to surface indirectly across diverse contemporary practices.

The institutional context is significant. Founded in late 2024, MICAS is a new kunsthalle set against Valletta’s historic fortifications, overlooking the Mediterranean. Devaney, its first artistic director, has spoken of ambitions comparable to the Serpentine Gallery or the New Museum. Within this setting, Avery’s seascapes and horizon lines – once dismissed as insufficiently engaged with their moment – appear newly resonant when seen alongside artists for whom colour and mood have again come to the fore.

This reassessment is reinforced by the artists themselves. Reflecting on Avery’s legacy, Harold Ancart describes genius as the ability to sustain an ‘uncompromised creativity’, remaining ‘very true to themselves without being concerned with what the rest of the world is going to think’. Avery’s work, he argues, was ‘distinct; unlike most work that was being made at the time’. For Andrew Cranston, Avery’s paintings belong to a tradition of seriousness without heaviness. He recalls an anecdote about a Russian collector who described Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Goya as ‘heavy metal’, while Matisse was ‘a light soufflé’. Avery, Cranston suggests, occupies this latter register: buoyant and intimate, yet technically exacting and hard-won.

What was once read as a lack of ambition now appears as the basis of Avery’s durability. This shift in interpretation has been accompanied by a cautious but meaningful recalibration of his market.

If Avery’s institutional standing has shifted decisively, the market response has been selective rather than sweeping. Rather than a wholesale revaluation, his market has recalibrated at the upper end, driven by a small number of high-quality oil paintings, while prices for works on paper have remained comparatively stable. The pattern points not to inventive rediscovery, but to a quality-led reassessment shaped by scarcity, institutional framing and controlled supply.

Auction results underline this stratification. In May 1999, The Seamstress (1944) sold for $376,500, a strong but not exceptional price that reflected Avery’s standing at the time as a respected but still marginal figure within American modernism. More than two decades later, The Letter (1945) achieved approximately $6.07 million at Sotheby’s New York in May 2022, exceeding its estimate and establishing a new auction record for the artist. The contrast between these prices is striking, but it reflects the exceptional quality of the later work and the broader inflation of the postwar American canon, rather than a uniform uplift across Avery’s output.

Works on paper continue to trade at more modest levels. Cow Grazing (1954), a gouache, realised $21,420 in May 2024, while Trees, Light and Dark (1955), a mixed-media work on paper, fetched $22,680 in March 2023. These figures point to steady liquidity and collector interest rather than acceleration, reinforcing the view that Avery’s market remains sharply tiered by medium, scale and period.

Avery’s presence within the international art-fair circuit further supports this reading. His repeated presentation at recent editions of Art Basel has signalled dealer confidence and institutional endorsement rather than novelty. At Art Basel Hong Kong 2025, a major painting – reported by market sources to be Lilacs (1943) – sold for approximately $800,000 from the booth of the Brussels-based gallery Xavier Hufkens, which represents the Avery estate. At Art Basel Miami Beach, galleries have continued to offer museum-quality works privately, including Yellow Sailfish (1960), alongside earlier figurative paintings from the 1930s. While many transactions remain undisclosed, Avery’s positioning within blue-chip fair contexts suggests consolidation at the high end rather than speculative expansion.

Measured against his peers, Avery’s trajectory remains distinctive. While Philip Guston’s market surged following renewed institutional attention to both his abstract and figurative phases – often propelled by sharp curatorial and political framing – Avery’s ascent has been slower and less volatile. Guston’s prices re-rated rapidly across multiple bodies of work; Avery’s market has instead rewarded a narrow group of canonical paintings rather than re-pricing the artist wholesale.

Early Mark Rothko offers a different comparison. Works from Rothko’s figurative and transitional periods now command prices far exceeding Avery’s top results, reflecting Rothko’s central position within the postwar canon and the later dominance of his mature abstraction. Yet recent institutional emphasis on Avery as a formative influence complicates this hierarchy. While Rothko’s early works are often framed as preludes to abstraction, Avery’s paintings are increasingly valued as resolved statements in their own right. The market has responded accordingly: Avery’s best oils still sit well below Rothko’s, but with a narrowing gap that reflects shifting critical priorities rather than speculative exuberance.

What ultimately distinguishes Avery from both Guston and Rothko is the absence of a dramatic rupture or narrative reversal. There is no single moment of apostasy, confrontation or definitive crisis to anchor his market story. Instead, Avery’s reappraisal rests on continuity: a sustained commitment to colour, intimacy and painterly autonomy. In market terms, this has produced not a spike, but a steadier form of validation – one that privileges durability over drama.