Art: Milton Avery’s Rich Fabric of Color

At the Whitney, a retrospective that does not mask his limits

Those Those who who like like artists artists with with dramatic dramatic lives (hot, heavy, conflict-ridden ear-cutters or their SoHo clones) will be dis appointed by Milton Avery’s. No major American artist has a thinner dossier. A mild, unassuming man who disliked publicity and made at best a bare living from his work, he joined no groups, signed no manifestos, was linked to no political causes, clobbered no body in the Cedar Bar and said very little about himself; when asked for his theories about art, his usual reply was “Why talk when you can paint?” It is not wholly a surprise that his family nickname was “Bunny.” Avery’s one apparent act of vanity was changing his birth date from 1885 to 1893, so that he would not seem an old fogy to the young art student, Sally Michel, whom he met in a rooming house in Gloucester, Mass., in 1924, courted and married. He was a man of ab solute dedication and conviction, a painter who did almost nothing but paint; the result was an enormous oeuvre, usually a painting a day until heart trouble slowed him down in 1949 and killed him, in his 80th year, in 1965.

The retrospective of some 150 Avery oils and watercolors, organized by Barbara Haskell to open the Whitney Museum’s fall season, can show only a fraction of this output. But it is a delectable fragment. It will also provide plenty of fuel for reassessment. Nobody could call Avery a neglected painter, but he did work against neglected painter, but he did work against the grain. In the ’30s and ’40s his Matissean aesthetic and his refusal to paint “social” subjects, whether of the left, like Ben Shahn, or of the right, like Thomas Hart Benton, made him an outsider in the art world; no small irony, since this son of a New York State country tanner struggled his whole life against pauperism. Later he would be considered rather a fuddy-duddy compared with the abstract expressionists, a generation behind him. He was, in that way, a victim of orthodox modernist thinking—which tended^ to suppose that his art had not “evolved” beyond its representational purposes, toward abstraction. In the late 1950s, when Avery was 70 and at the peak of his talent, his prices were about one-tenth of Pollock’s. (They still are, but Pollock’s now cost millions.)

Other painters, however, had no illusions about his merits. Mark Rothko treated him as a master—appropriately, since Rothko’s glowing, blur-edged rectangles, now so prized as icons of American romanticism, were largely derived from Avery’s landscapes. Avery’s influence on American abstract painting in the ’50s and ’60s, not only as a stylist but as a moral example of commitment and aesthetic ambition, was much greater than has usually been supposed. His way of rilling a canvas with broad fields of color “tuned” by dispersed accumulations of detail (a cluster of rocks, a flurry of waves, a knot of seaweed, a post or two) had everything to do with the compositional procedures of color-field painting in the ’60s. So did his liking for dilute, discreetly modulated washes of pure pigment that stained the canvas rather than sat on it.

But to regard Avery as a potentially abstract painter who could not quite summon up the courage to drop content was one of the minor illusions of the ’60s. Avery was uncompromisingly a figurative artist, like his mentors: Matisse and to some extent Picasso in Europe, and in America such painters as Ryder (with his visionary seascapes) and Twachtman. What his best works offer is a very American sense of Arcadia, a hard-won paradise of the natural world reconstructed in terms of color. Shape is reduced to the minimum: some flat silhouettes, relatively little internal texture.

Avery was not good at maintaining a suavely impasted surface, though sometimes he could bring one off with real subtlety the bursting fan of foam over the rocks in White Wave, 1954, is like a Monet haystack made of water, not grass. But the major Averys, like Sea and Sand Dunes, 1955, or Speedboat’s Wake, 1959, are thin, taut, nearly as evanescent looking as weather itself. Their pictorial construction is achieved almost entirely through color: the weight of a red, the brooding distension of a purplish sea against a blue headland. Nothing is subordinate in such paintings, and their dialogue between feeling and repression .is like nothing else in American art.

One can deplore the injustice art fashion did to Avery without, however, going to the opposite extreme of making him into a Yankee Matisse, a painter (in the recent words of Critic Hilton Kramer) comparable to late Turner and late Cézanne, displaying “the kind of archetypal grandeur and sweep that is to be found only among the masterworks of modern art.” Of Avery’s power as a colorist, there is no reasonable doubt. The only way not to feel it in the Whitney is to wear sunglasses. But Avery as draftsman? The color weaves a seamless fabric of pleasure; the drawing punches large puritan holes.

As a committed modernist à la française, Avery treated the figure as a strictly formal affair: patch for the dress or bathing suit, patch for face, no detail. In the process he often produced a curious scragginess. The parts of the bodies rarely connect well, and have noli me tangere written all over them. Sometimes his lumpish ladies on the beach suggest Thurber. In Matisse, no matter how reduced the outline may be or how schematic the stroke of the crayon that says “eye,” “breast” or “hip,” one can almost always sense the live weight of a body, its organic relationship of part to part, its accessibility to touch. This ability to translate the presence of the physical object into abbreviated signs without sensuous loss is a precondition of good figure drawing, and Avery lacked it; his attitude was too distanced, his style too mannered and crotchety.

His figures are really ideograms, and they tell us as little about bodies as his small gray painting of a diving sea bird tells us about gulls. Its interest is focused wholly within the color—that rich “gray,” actually a complicated melding of green, gray and dark rose, which pulsates with such airy serenity around the white patch of a bird. In the same way, the human figure in Avery is a locus of color, something to carry a desired area of blue or pink. When he invested his figures with the same rhythmic sureness as the flat patches of his landscapes, as in Two Figures by the Sea, 1963, with its subtle relationships between the blues of the left figure, the dark plane of water and the putty-colored sand, the results were exquisite. But he did not always manage to; and that is why Avery, though as good a painter as any American modernist and better than most, a brave and eloquent sensibility, was not the equal of the European masters he revered. —By Robert Hughes