Peter Milton was born in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania. He studied with famed graphic artists Gabor Peterdi and Josef Albers at Yale University during the 1950s. Developing his own style, he initially concentrated on panoramic landscapes and later created images that are dreamlike and surreal.
Milton combines the strange and the familiar, the past and the present in prints noted for their meticulous craftsmanship. Dreamlike, his complicated images seem to draw upon simultaneous events and memories. Passage II, for example, brings together figures from different eras who occupy three different planes in space.
Milton's drawings, etchings, and engravings are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The British Museum, among others.
[This is an excerpt from the interactive companion program to the videodisc American Art from the National Gallery of Art. Produced by the Department of Education Resources, this teaching resource is one of the Gallery's free-loan educational programs.]