The family of the American painter Milton Avery (1885-1965), who bridged realist and abstract art in his luminous canvases of flat, simplified forms and unexpected colour juxtapositions, has selected Karma to represent the artist in the US. The estate will continue to be represented by Victoria Miro in London and Xavier Hufkens in Brussels.
Karma, which has spaces in New York and Los Angeles, will introduce the new collaboration this month at Art Basel Miami Beach (4-8 December) with three of Avery’s little-known circus-themed canvases from the 1930s. These figurative works, depicting a snake charmer, a lion tamer and a trapeze artist, offer a glimpse of what is to come in the gallery’s first Avery exhibition, opening November 2025 in New York. This show will be dedicated to portraiture spanning the artist’s career and be accompanied by a monograph.
“Some of these portraits are just wild,” says Karma’s founder, Brendan Dugan. “I think it’s going to be a real revelation for people to see their radicality—not necessarily a word people think about when they think about Avery.” The artist is most recognised for his tranquil and distilled landscapes from the 1950s, approaching abstraction but grounded in observation, even though he also worked in portraiture and still-life throughout the decades.
At Art Basel Miami Beach, Karma gallery will show a group of 1930s circus-themed canvases by Milton Avery (photographed around 1930), while a show next year will focus on his portraiture Courtesy of the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation
March Avery, the artist’s daughter, and her son, Sean Avery Cavanaugh—both painters, as was Avery’s late wife, Sally Michel —were introduced to Dugan by the curator and collector Waqas Wajahat, an adviser to the family for more than two decades.
“Avery was this gigantic influence on American art after the Second World War and continues to be relevant to so many contemporary artists. Karma made sense because a lot of its artists are really influenced by Avery,” Wajahat says, pointing to notable colourists on the gallery’s roster, including Reggie Burrows Hodges and Nicolas Party, who collect Avery themselves.
In his lifetime, Avery exhibited at the Grace Borgenicht gallery, which continued to represent his estate long after his death, followed by André Emmerich and then Knoedler. DC Moore had seven solo shows from 1999 to 2019 dealing in the secondary market but did not work directly with the estate.
“We don’t just want to do the greatest hits anymore; it’s been done,” Cavanaugh says. He is a trustee of the estate and the vice president of the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, which gives hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in arts education grants. “Let’s really mine the collection and put on interesting shows that are truly curated. Brendan showed excitement around that idea.”
Milton Avery, Snake Charmer, 1938 © 2024 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The estate still has significant inventory, from across all periods and all materials. “My grandfather had a sort of New England Yankee work-hard-every-day kind of thing,” Cavanaugh says, estimating Avery made around 1,000 oil paintings and several thousand works on paper. (No catalogue raisonné has been produced to firmly quantify this figure.)
In 2022, Sotheby’s New York set a new auction record of $6m with Avery’s 1945 interior scene The Letter. Small paintings can sell in the $100,000 range, Dugan says, while a masterpiece could bring $3m to $4m.
Working-class roots
Born in western New York state to a working-class family that moved to Hartford, Connecticut, when he was young, Avery helped support his family with factory work while taking night classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students. By 1911 he listed his occupation as “artist” and exhibited in a group show at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. He met his future wife in 1924 while both were sketching on the rocks in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Avery followed Michel back to New York and they married in 1926.
A recent Avery retrospective, which opened in 2021 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, before travelling to the Royal Academy of Arts in London,delved into the artist’s close friendships with Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, and his influence on Abstract Expressionism, particularly colour field painting. Its curator, Edith Devaney, is now collaborating with the estate on Milton Avery and His Influence on Contemporary Art, to go on view next October at the Malta International Contemporary Art Space, where she is the director. It will survey Avery’s work alongside a broad group of contemporary painters, including Gary Hume, who once told Devaney that “Avery taught me everything I know about colour”, she recalls, adding: “The exhibition will take Avery slightly out of his time and allow us to look at him with fresh eyes.”
- Art Basel Miami Beach, 4-8 December