7/12/22, 10:15 AM Milton Avery review — open your eyes to this American master of colour | Times2 | The Times

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tuesday july 12 2022

Detail of Little Fox River (1942)

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2022

FIRST NIGHT | VISUAL ART

Milton Avery review — open your eyes to

this American master of colour
Royal Academy
new

Laura Freeman

Tuesday July 12 2022, 10.00am, The Times

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★★★★☆

Pity the bridge man. The artist who falls between two stalls.
Neither grand old master nor thrusting young Turk. Milton
Avery was just such a bridge. He began his painting life under
the spell of American impressionism and ended it with works
that would inspire the younger generation of abstract
expressionists.

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7/12/22, 10:15 AM Milton Avery review — open your eyes to this American master of colour | Times2 | The Times

If Avery paved the way for Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and
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Barnett Newman, then it was a yellow-pink-and-cobalt brick
road. He was America’s first great modern colourist with a
bracing, racing-silk palette. Never heard of him? You won’t be
the only one. This is the first Avery exhibition in Europe. The
most recent Avery show in America was at the Whitney
Museum in New York in 1982. You’ll be glad to get to know him
now.

The painting you see as you enter the exhibition is Little Fox
River (1942). It’s a picture with zing. On a hot day, just looking at
it is like the first lick of an ice lolly or the first toe in the sea.
From here, the story spools back to the 1910s when Avery, born
in 1885 to a working-class family from near Hartford,
Connecticut, was painting pleasant, passable landscapes, more
or less after Monet, in the American impressionist tradition.
Spindly Trees (c 1910) and Lovely Day (1918) do what they say in
the tin: spindly, insubstantial, only lovely enough. Then comes
the jump. From the polite Setting Sun (1918) to the robust
Moody Landscape (1930) with its bruised and wine-stained
hues. What happened in between? New York and a new vision.

Detail of Husband and Wife (1945)

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7/12/22, 10:15 AM Milton Avery review — open your eyes to this American master of colour | Times2 | The Times

At sixteen Avery had started work in a factory. Hoping for

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better things, he enrolled in a course on commercial lettering at
the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford. When the
class was discontinued after only a few weeks, Avery was
encouraged to switch to life drawing. This was a springboard to
the School of the Art Society of Hartford and, in 1925, to New
York where he married Sally Michel, an illustrator whose family
disapproved of her penniless husband. A bad time to be an
artist. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 led to the Great Depression.
Avery took on the odd commission for the WPA Federal Art
Project, part of the New Deal stimulus package, which found
work for artists, but pride put him off taking handouts. (“Did he
have conviction in himself?” Waqas Wajahat, the curator, asks
March Avery of her father in a catalogue essay. “Did he ever!”
she replies.) If you saw the Royal Academy’s America After the
Fall: Painting in the 1930s exhibition in 2017 and Abstract
Expressionism in 2016, this show slots neatly into place.

Avery comes into his own in the 1930s. A painting such as Fall in
Vermont (1935) is a world away from the insipid, nicely-nicely
Big Sky (1918). Scratch, scratch goes the palette brush over the
red leaves of an autumn maple tree. Then, scritch, scritch across
the checked windbreak in Fishing Village (1939). Try this
experiment: look at Fox River Village (1938) and imagine you
had Avery’s brush in your hand. How would you move it to
make the same marks? Side to side, to and fro, on the slant, dot
and dash. It’s as if rain, wind and tide are all acting in different
directions. Try it again with the later painting Speedboat in a
Choppy Sea (1950). The brush seems to lift, skim and sink with
the whumpf, whumpf, whumpf of the boat. In the still life Hors
d’Oeuvres (1943) the paint is laid on the canvas thick as
Philadelphia cheese.

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Every Saturday in New York, Milton and Sally would visit

museums and galleries. They must have had the odd Saturday
off, for in Coney Island (1931) Avery painted big-bottomed
bathers stretched out on their own inch of sand. His bathers
recur, juicier in form and colour with each new iteration.

Colour is what you’re here for, tangy and acidic, sour and sweet.
Take Husband and Wife (1945), he with his Fanta-tanned face
and she with her pale, absinthe mask. There’s a dash of Matisse
in Avery’s figures with their cut-out contours and paint-swatch
heads. Rooster’s Domain (1948) positively crows with colour.
Was any cockerel ever such a strutting, impossible blue? Blue
Trees (1945) is a forest of fabulous, feathery shades of Smurf.

Blossoming (1918)
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2022

Avery doesn’t always get it right. The colours in March in Brown

(1954) and Poetry Reading (1957) are a murky melting pot of
tans and browns. Elsewhere, though, his shades are sheer ice-
cream sundae:
PREVIOUS ARTICLEraspberry ripple, pina colada, the slightly
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7/12/22, 10:15 AM Milton Avery review — open your eyes to this American master of colour | Times2 | The Times

green of mint Viennetta. Sea & Sand Dunes (1955) is all

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candyfloss and blackcurrant cordial. You can see why Avery
appealed to Rothko. “There have been others in our generation
who have celebrated the world around them,” Rothko said, “but
none with that inevitability where the poetry penetrated every
pore of the canvas to the very last touch of the brush. For Avery
was a great poet-inventor who invented sonorities never seen
nor heard before.”

The fashionistas talk of “colour-blocking” your outfits. Avery

had the knack: blood orange against turquoise; Colman’s
mustard against coal black. If you’ve a dress or a shirt that you
never wear because it’s too bright, too pink, too lime or too lilac,
come on shrinking violets, now’s your chance.

Do I think Avery is a first-class artist? A proto-Rothko and a

Pollock before Pollock? No, I don’t. He’s the middleman, the
guide who hacks away the thickest vines. Did I leave wide-eyed
and dazzled, the way you do after a day of too much sun on the
beach? Did I feel invigorated and vow never to wear navy again?
I did, I did.

Milton Avery: American Colourist is on from July 15 to October

16, royalacademy.org.uk

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