Living and working in New York in the 1930s and 1940s, American painter Milton Avery established relationships with younger Abstract Expressionist artists such as Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. Avery’s style, in which figures and objects are flattened into interlocking wedges of saturated, luminous color within a shallow pictorial space, was highly influential in the development of Abstract Expressionism and its new artistic vocabulary. This portrait of the artist’s twelve-year-old daughter, March, is a classic example of Avery’s compositional techniques with its simplified forms divested of identifying detail and stark delineation of shapes.
