Cheery colors, flat surfaces, simplified shapes....in those years when I often walked in and around Washington Square Park in the Village I often had a look at paintings by Milton Avery. The gallery that showed them was on a corner and down some steps; its windows were not far above street level. You had to look down on them to see them. And so I did, in both senses of the word. Very pleasant, I'd think. Very not much else. Boy was I wrong. I walked through the current exhibition devoted to him at the Royal Academy in London and was wowed over and over again.
Self-Portrait 1941
So a few facts about him and then a series of pictures:
Avery was born in New York State in 1885 and died in 1965. His grave is in the Woodstock, NY artists Cemetery. (I confess that I lived in Woodstock and didn't know it had one! Although it sure had plenty of artists--actually or in name only.) I learn from the RA catalogue that he was represented over the years by a number of prestigious, uptown galleries: Valentine Gallery, Paul Rosenberg&Co, Durand-Ruel, Grace Borgenicht.
A painter who was "on the scene" in the Village, Provincetown and Woodstock but also Key West which I associate more with Tennessee Williams and Hemingway than with painters..we see Avery at the start transfixed by the Impressionists. And then he is on the move going his own way. It was a trip that took him so far into the pleasures of color that by the end it was Avery who was influencing the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters. It is said that he was "a man of few words" and maybe that is why he wasn't better known in his time. Well that is for another kind of writer to write about. My message is short and sweet:
Go to this show if you can: Enjoy it; be surprised; look, learn a thing or two and be wowed.
\Setting Sun 1918
March in Brown 1954
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