Sally Michel, Brilliant Legacy

Emerging from New York’s art scene of the Great Depression was the distinctive style developed by a remarkable couple: Sally Michel (1902-2003) and Milton Avery (1885-1965). Variously called Realist-Abstraction or Color Field Realism, their idiosyncratic look combined a fidelity to the observed world with geometric simplicity as they painted quotidian vignettes of people and nature in unexpected swaths of vivid color. Sally worked through the 1940s as a commercial artist to support their family and, even after Milton’s death in 1965, she saw to her role as the greatest champion of her husband’s work. All the while—from the moment of their first meeting in Gloucester, MA, during the summer of 1924 and through their four decades together through Milton’s death in 1965—they painted together and thought critically about the art of their time amid an incredible circle of painter friends such as Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnet Newman. Their shared approach to art underpinned Sally’s work through a very active period that stretched into the 1990s.