Discover Milton Avery at the Wadsworth

 

 

MILTON AVERY

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

Hartford, Connecticut

Through June 5, 2022.

[Click on works for larger viewing size]

 

The acknowledged greats of art generally deserve their exalted reputations. Yet, most people who like art have a fondness for someone who is ranked a notch or two below on the esteem scale. Milton Avery has long been on my list of underappreciated painters. The Wadsworth show in Hartford organized by London’s Royal Academy of Arts might put him on your list as well. Funny that London took the lead on this show, given that Avery (1885-1965) was on the New York/Connecticut shuttle for most of his life and the Wadsworth owns several of his best works.

 

Avery was an important American Modernist who is sometimes called the “American Matisse.” Like Matisse, Avery took to a Modernist style that emphasized color, line, shape, and form over symbolism, allegory, and representationalism. That is, that’s where he ended up. Like a lot of painters, he began more conventionally. As we see at the Wadsworth, his earliest works dabbled in landscape. T’is a wise person who pivots when realizing the mundanity of such works. 

 

Avery vs. Hartley

 

 

 

 

His father was an artist and Avery married one himself, Sally Michel, with whom he raised a daughter named March. Avery wasn’t very good at portraiture either, unless it was caricature, such as his deprecatory self-portrait. (He actually did have protruding ears, though!) Note the hints of work from his friend Marsden Hartley in his self-portrait. Avery’s blockier style was an offshoot of cubism, as were many Hartley’s. Avery’s self-portrait even hints of Hartley’s homoeroticism, though he wasn’t gay and Hartley was. (I often wonder why few critics have picked up on David Hockney’s debt to Hartley and Avery.)    

 

 

His daughter March was one of Avery’s favorite models. He painted her with a Picasso-like mask when she was young and in different moods and settings throughout her life. She got a long neck, not her father’s ears! 

 

 

 

Avery was often playful. Blue trees to represent a New England autumn? An aerial view of beachside homes that look like pianos crossed with staples a spit of land? Why not? Who doesn’t need an abstracted lizard to grace a still life of flowers? 

 

 

 

One of the things I really like about Avery is that he’s one of those people who reminds you of a lot of other painters yet once he hit his stride, he managed to be entirely himself. He befriended Mark Rothko and even did a few three-color panel canvases like Rothko when they painted together. Can you paint just three color blocks and make it look different? He managed.

 

 

 

He also flitted through a phase in which he painted with acidic colors reminiscent of the German expressionist Ernst Kirchner mixed with a splash of Lucian Freud. But other projects hint of fauvism and surrealism, which he admired, or the troubled thoughts of Edvard Munch. (By most accounts, Avery was not a tormented soul.) He went to Coney Island and captured its surrealistic energy in ways analogous to Reginald Marsh, but with a different take.

 

 

Avery (top) vs. Marsh

 

 

 

Ultimately, though, Avery’s greatest success came via addition by subtraction evocative of Matisse. By this I mean he began to simplify. He painted in ways that told a story in as few lines and shapes as possible without journeying into chaotic distortion. Check out this beach scene that reduces sunbathers to pyramid-like rocks. Those red slashes in the water are a swimmer knifing through the water. 

 

 

 

Much of Avery’s work is calming because he gives just enough information to invite you to fill in details without giving away what he intended or telling the viewer what to think.  And often it’s not supposed to be anything other than people wiling away the time. He didn’t even need to bother with any sort of Art 101 perspective. Who knows? Maybe he wasn’t much better with perspective than he was at landscapes or portraits, but I think he knew exactly what he was doing. Matisse also dispensed with illusional 3-D perspective. Who says you need it to convey emotion or infer anything other than what’s on the canvas? 

 

 

 

Milton Avery–an American original. Even when he reminds you of others.

 

Rob Weir