Milton Avery (1885-1965) American, etching titled “Twisted Tree”. Provenance: By descent from the gallery directly to the current owner. This piece features a tree growing on a hill, the trunk grows upward and then twists around itself before stretching up toward the sky. The background landscape of the work shows a rolling landscape full of life. Artist Signed, Lower Left & Lower Right. Numbered 42/60, Lower Left. Dated 1943, Lower Right. Provenance: Marianne Friedland Gallery, Ontario. Overall Size: 18 3/4 x 15 1/4 in. Sight Size: 6 1/2 x 5 in. Frame Thickness: 3/4 in. #1293 Milton Clark Avery was born in Sand Bank (now Altmar), Connecticut, March 7, 1885. He began developing his artistic talents during his teenage years. Sometime after his father died in 1905, Avery began taking art classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford and studied there on a part-time basis until 1918. Avery first exhibited at the Wadsworth Atheneum's Fifth Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture in 1915, but soon after his arrival in New York he began showing regularly. His work was included in the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in 1927 and the following year fellow artist Bernard Karifol selected two of his paintings for a group show at the Opportunity Gallery in New York. Avery's work of the 1930s suggests the influence of such German Expressionist painters as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Avery's style evolved over time from Impressionism to modernism and by the 1930s he had developed his signature style of combining abstraction with representational forms to create a unified whole. However, during the 1940's, he developed a style characterized by simplified and delicately-modulated color planes, inspired in particular by the art of the Fauvist painter, Henri Matisse. Although Avery's work always involved a recognizable subject such as figures in an interior, still lifes or landscapes he successfully achieved a subtle balance between representation and abstraction, permeating his oeuvre with a mysterious, inner sensibility. Indeed, Avery's aesthetic, based upon an intuitive, spiritual response to nature, set him very much apart from the mainstream art of the thirties and forties, which was dominated by Realism imbued with socialist and/or regionalist overtones. Avery's work thus stands as a critical link between the early European colorists and the artist of the New York School, such as Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko (who once described Avery as a "great poet-inventor who had invented sonorities never seen nor heard before"). In addition to painting in oil, Avery was also a gifted watercolorist. He also produced numerous drypoint etchings and monotypes, as well as drawings. In his mature paintings, he flattened form and applied intense colors in large unbroken areas. This unique style, often depicting scenes from the natural world and images of the artist's family, has become part of the canon of modernism.