Night Harbor

Night Harbor represents the ocean as seen from Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Milton Avery spent the summer of 1957 with his friend and fellow painter Mark Rothko. Avery had spent much of his career dabbling with abstraction, yet maintaining recognizable subject matter. Painted toward the end of his life, this simply composed work is the most abstract of his career. The thin yellow line identifies a rising or setting sun, while the frenzied brushstrokes suggest the atmospheric effects in the summertime sky.

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