Time & Perspective Quote by Milton Avery

Avery is describing a tightrope act: painting that wants to be pure design without becoming emotionally blank. The first sentence reads like a manifesto for modernism’s clean break from storytelling. “Shapes, spaces, colors” aren’t ingredients for depicting a thing; they’re the thing. By insisting on “unique relationships, independent of any subject matter,” he’s staking a claim against illustration, against painting as mere translation of the visible world. It’s a quiet rebuke to the expectation that art must explain itself through recognizable narratives.

Then he complicates it. The “at the same time” is the pressure point, admitting that formal purity isn’t his endgame. Avery wants abstraction’s autonomy and representation’s charge: the “excitement and emotion” triggered by an “original idea” still has to survive the journey into color and form. That phrasing matters. He doesn’t say he copies a landscape or a figure; he captures what happens in him upon impact. The subject, in other words, is the artist’s experience of the subject.

Context sharpens the stakes. Avery worked in the long midcentury moment when American painting was drifting toward abstraction, but his own work often stayed figurative, simplified, flattened, stubbornly lyrical. This quote positions him as a bridge: modernist in structure, human in temperature. The subtext is a defense of pleasure and feeling as serious formal problems, not embarrassing leftovers. He’s arguing that design can carry emotion without leaning on anecdote - that a painting can be both self-contained and intensely lived.