Milton Avery was perhaps the most influential artist to sustain a viable figurative tradition between the 1930s and 1950s, creating works that defied categorization and that were embraced by Abstract Expressionists and Color Field artists, who saw him as a kindred spirit. Bridging the divide between abstraction and representation, Avery’s landscape paintings convey an almost spiritual confrontation with nature, distilling the artist’s subjective experience of his surroundings into formally elegant and emotionally resonant compositions that are both timeless and universal.

"Black Sea" was almost certainly inspired by Avery’s regular summer vacations in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he sketched and painted outdoors. Avery often painted watercolors on site, and he would later translate these compositions into oils in his New York studio. The striking black and yellow colors evoke the moments after sunset, when the sunlight gradually fades into darkness.