6 Artists Share Painter Milton Avery’s Impact on Their Work

You might not know Milton Avery’s name off the top of your head, but once you see the legendary painter’s art, you’ll recognize his work. That’s because Avery, who lived from 1885 to 1965, was one of the creators of American abstract painting, using color relations with incredible subtlety throughout his 30-plus-year career. His inventive approach to landscape painting gave him the nickname “the American Matisse.” Unlike his contemporaries and predecessors, who’d been doing conventional Western paintings since the Renaissance, Avery’s work was representational and not concerned with creating any kind of illusion of depth.

The Altmar, New York native—who lived in New York City with his wife, the artist Sally Michel Avery, and his daughter, March Avery, also an artist—has had works appear at MoMA and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, inside the National Gallery of Art in D.C., and many more institutions. Now, his pieces are the subject of two major exhibitions that examine his artistic legacy. The first is Malta International Contemporary Arts Space’s Milton Avery and His Enduring Influence on Contemporary Painting, open in the European country until April 4, 2026. That show will feature work by contemporary painters next to the Avery pieces that informed their practices.

The next is Milton Avery: The Figure at Karma Gallery in Los Angeles, which is opening concurrently with the city’s Frieze Art Week. This exhibition is dedicated solely to Avery’s portraiture from the 1920s through the 1960s, and will be open from February 21 to March 28, 2026.

Avery has influenced generations of figurative painters: he mentored Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko (the latter of whom said in 1965 that Avery’s “gripping lyricism” could “often achieve the permanence and monumentality of Egypt”), while Alex Katz, Peter Doig, Joe Bradley, Nicole Eisenman, Harold Ancart, and many others cite him as a singular inspiration when it comes to the development of their style.

Below, we asked six prominent artists around the world to discuss their favorite Milton Avery works—and why the paintings still resonate with them after all these years.

Mama’s Boy, 1944

“I included this painting in a group exhibition titled Sputterances that I curated at Metro Pictures in 2017. A hot, heavy boy weighing on a cold and fragile mother. Freud is here: the mother always already failing to satiate what is demanded of her—buckling under the weight of the boy’s needs. A reverse Pietà of sorts. Mama’s boy seems unaware—an innocent incubus. It’s all so funny and sad—a profound banality. Milton at his best.” —Sanya Kantarovsky

Interlude, 1960

“Planes, hues, tones, drawing, a feeling. A thing. This is what I love using to make a painting. The exquisite balance between the depicted and the object it has become gets me shivery with delight. Interlude does that—each piece connects, forms an image, opens my mind like a memory, and then rests back into its thingness. The painting, the object. A delight.” —Gary Hume

The Typist, 1952

“What I admire most about Milton Avery’s The Typist is how he convinces us that this typist has hands moving over a keyboard. He has slipped those hands under a black slab of a typewriter that has a diagonal sheet of white paper jutting out. How glad we are that Avery didn’t spell out the brand or year of that typewriter. It stands in for all time as some kind of writing machine. The bed and the lamp and the typist and the room are all likewise treated in a universal and economic way that will last and be believable and be relatable for all time. As an extra treat for the viewer, Avery places the lamp within a cove lit by a lighter shade of purple. We really can’t ask for more.” —Katherine Bradford

Bus Ride, 1941

“It’s a fun painting, maybe even a little silly but charming and playful. With Avery, there’s always playfulness. Bus rides don’t really look like this but they feel like it. I love the directness of the work, the boldness of it. Despite cars being so prevalent in our lives they are largely absent from modern and contemporary art, avoided really; especially rare are representations of the experience of driving or being driven, the point of view from the inside of a vehicle. I can think of Matisse’s two paintings made from the interior of a car in 1917 and 1925. Peter Doig made some paintings in the late 1990s that acknowledge peripherally the point of view of a driver or passenger, including windscreens and rear and wing mirrors. I’m sure there are others. With Avery, things register first as shapes, a beautiful shorthand which lassos a shape, almost (but never completely) separating it from the whole. This tendency towards simplicity isn’t constrained by a modernist straitjacket, Avery allows himself diagonals and curves, and humor, too. The stars of the show are two illuminated shapes of light on the faces of the figures to the left (a girl and her grandfather?).

I love the whole mood of the painting, how toned the figures’ bodies are, melding with the bus itself, part of the furniture. The figures appear, through the tilt of their bodies and eye contact, to be in conversation with each other, talking across the aisle. It makes me think of certain passages in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem The Moose, describing overheard conversations on a bus journey. In the creaking and noises, an old conversation—not concerning us, but recognizable, somewhere, back in the bus:

Grandparents’ voices

uninterruptedly

talking, in Eternity:

names being mentioned,

things cleared up finally;

what he said, what she said,

who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;

the year he remarried;

the year (something) happened.

She died in childbirth.

That was the son lost

when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.

She went to the bad.

When Amos began to pray

even in the store and

finally the family had

to put him away.

“Yes ...” that peculiar

affirmative. “Yes ...”

A sharp, indrawn breath,

half groan, half acceptance,

that means “Life’s like that.

We know it (also death).” —Andrew Cranston

Black Sea, 1945

“My all-time favorite painting from Milton Avery is Black Sea, which I finally got to see in person last year at The Phillips Collection in Washington, where it resides. For some time, I’ve considered it as a lodestar, something to look up to, for its bold simplification of not just composition and drawing, but also of color and texture. How to do so much with so little is very powerful. It’s something that I aspire to as well.” —Henni Alftan

Blue Sea, Red Sky, 1958

“I’ve always felt connected to Avery, but when I revisit his work I’m always surprised by the similarities in my work and his, like way more than I was conscious of. It’s really a testament to Avery’s influence. It wasn’t at the forefront of my mind, but he is very clearly there. It’s just a slow burn to realize it. His paintings, Blue Sea, Red Sky (1958), Boathouse by the Sea (1959) and Rippled Sea (1960), in particular speak to this. I couldn’t believe how the horizon seascape paintings are so similar to the things that I was talking about in my tennis court paintings, like French Open 7 (2015). Avery is doing what I try to get to with my paintings, which is simplifying things and finding the balance in just a few elements. They’re taking on the same kind of interests in figuration: the abstraction, the flatness, the distortion, and getting into a different realm where you’re entering somebody else’s world. But you know it’s a shared world.” —Jonas Wood