Milton Avery was one of the few American masters of figure painting during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Emphasizing broad, flattened planes of color in the tradition of Matisse, his work has a personal poetry of forms which are arresting and moving. In the 30’s and 40’s he painted in representational images, but subordinated line to color, using delicately modulated color shapes to define form. Avery stood apart from the Social Realists of his generation but was a major link between the color paintings and collages of Matisse and the American color-field painters of the 1950’s and 1960’s such as his good friend, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler and Adolph Gottlieb. His later work concentrated more on pure landscape and more abstract forms.