Card Players

Milton Avery was an artist of singular vision and is one of America’s foremost colorist painters. Born in 1885 into a working class family, he worked factory jobs in Connecticut while attending regional art schools firmly focused on traditional representative styles of painting. Nevertheless in the 1920s and 1930s he developed and pursued an individual style based on modernist aesthetics and visual images in which simplified forms were structured by color harmonies. After World War II, when American painting turned to Abstract Expressionism, Avery continued to paint identifiable, observed forms, stripped of details and reliant on color to provide the structure for conveying the essence of the image.  In so doing, he bridged the gap between American realism and abstraction.

 In The Card Players, Avery employs a timeless theme of ordinary, daily life. The players are reduced to broad shapes, yet clearly identifiable as figures. The subject is familiar to us and we readily identify with the physicality of the activity—the blue figure leans slightly forward over the pale orange card table, the yellow and red figure is settled back in her chair; the amusing dog’s face on a blue pillow completes the domestic scene. Color provides the spatial structure of the painting: bright blues and contrasting orange and yellows in the fore and middle grounds; receding minor tones of gray, mauve, purple and brown for the background room. The colors also evoke the feeling of tranquility and leisure enjoyed by the game’s participants.