Abstract Expressionism is widely regarded as America’s first great stride in painting—a genre it could confidently claim as its own, separate from the overbearing influence of the European tradition. It is perhaps with some irony then that Milton Avery, the artist who precipitated the movement and inspired many of its proponents—including his friends Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb—should have been lauded as “America’s Matisse.”
Avery didn’t like the comparison. And as is demonstrated by the Royal Academy’s new exhibition of works by the artist—the first ever in Europe, open until 16th October—there is much about Avery’s work that deserves appreciating on its own terms, and for its own particular American context.
Born in 1885 into a working-class family in Altmar, upstate New York, but spending much of his early life in Hartford, Connecticut, Avery seems to have discovered his artistic ambition only gradually. At the age of 16 he left school to work in a local factory as an aligner and assembler. After the death of his father in a wood-chopping accident, he took a course in “commercial lettering” to earn a living. By 1911, he was putting down his occupation in the local directory as “artist.” Four years after that, he exhibited his first painting at the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts.
Taking in a broad sweep from Avery’s formative years up to his death in 1965, the small and focused exhibition at the RA also reveals that Avery’s artistic sensibilities were equally slow burning. His earliest landscape work begins with an impressionistic flavour that, though deft and beautiful, remains somewhat anonymous. But within a decade Avery had adopted a flatter, more tonally interesting approach to his quilted fields and coastal towns, before applying similar techniques to cityscapes and domestic scenes of New York City (where he lived from 1925) and finally to portraiture.
The most obvious evolution throughout Avery’s work is a rigorous paring back of an image to its most important aspects—a process best seen in two double portraits of Avery and his wife Sally (who was also an artist) painted around 15 years apart. In the first, The Artist and his Wife (1928–1929), the couple stare at the viewer from a shadowy corner. The image is tall and narrow with an almost theatrical quality to its composition and lighting. In the other, 1945’s Husband and Wife, the pair sit in a bright, airy living room. They have become barely recognisable, reduced to a series of brilliant blocks of colour and a handful of essential identifying elements: Milton’s pipe and bowtie, Sally’s neckerchief.
Avery’s lifelong journey from the representative towards the abstract means his work is almost infinitely compartmental: each room at the RA show, largely hung in chronological order, could be the work of a different artist. This slow progression takes in some experimental detours in the use of colour, line and texture, before culminating in a room displaying a late body of work that the artist made over the course of several summer trips to Cape Cod.
In some respects, Avery remained fundamentally a representative painter all his life: even in this last room four bold stripes of colour, as in Boathouse by the Sea (1959), denote a fiery sunset as seen from the shadow of the boathouse on the beach. The meaning behind a languid white line cutting through a feathery field of blues and browns is likewise revealed by its title: Speedboat in a Choppy Sea (1960). In this room we realise that Avery was forever grounded in something tangible, no matter how abstract his finished pictures became.
Sometimes, these “abstract landscapes” feel somewhat unresolved: having committed to neither abstraction nor representation, Avery takes the more daring, challenging and not always successful route of charting a path between them.
But if these late works can feel less revelatory in isolation, it’s when we take Avery’s career in the round that we remember art is much less about the individual magnum opus than the consecutive parts that led up to it. Throughout his life, Avery never settled for the comfortable or the easy. By constantly pushing his own art into unfamiliar territory, he set the ground rules for a new wave of American experimentation in 20th-century art—and it’s there that his standing as an artist remains in no doubt.
Milton Avery: American Colourist is on display at the Royal Academy of Arts from 15th July to 16th October
