Title Unknown, circa 1975
It is nearly impossible to talk about the work of American artist Sally Michel Avery without also discussing that of her husband, Milton Avery, with whom she shared a studio for decades. Together, the two created a visual language of simplified graphic forms imbued with the vibrant colors of Fauvism. Avery studied at New York’s Art Students League and spent her career creating enticing, expressionistic landscapes, figures, and still lifes in oil and watercolor, many inspired by the charms of daily life and her love of Gloucester, Massachusetts. With its flattened foreground and background and color palette similar to that of Henri Matisse, Avery's work has been referred to as an “American folk art version of Parisian Modernism.”