Exhibitions 2
Milton Avery (Waddington Galleries, 11 Cork Street, London Wl, till 6 October)
Colour is the key
Andrew Lambirth
Milton Avery (1885-1965) is a painter who stands up remarkably well to contemporary taste. For instance, an echo seems to be struck between his work and the gorgeous colour harmonies of Craigie Aitchison. Though Aitchison is quick to distance himself from the American, there does appear to be a similar sensibility informing their work.
The impressive selection of Avery's late landscapes and seascapes currently at Waddington Galleries looks surprisingly fresh and full of vitality: also full of relevance. It is easy to see why he exercised such an influence over the American Abstract Expressionists and Colour Field painters — particularly Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. As Hans Hofmann said, 'Avery was one of the first to understand colour as a creative means. He was one of the first to relate colours in a plastic way', while Rothko is known to have called Avery the greatest American painter, much to the sceptical amusement of Alfred Barr, eximious director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Critics might have complained that Avery wasn't radical enough because he never embraced complete abstraction, but that didn't prevent his work from being a lasting inspiration to artists. In this case, the artists certainly knew best.
A prolific worker who usually produced a painting a day — it is said that he didn't do anything else but paint — Avery was largely self-taught, taking Matisse as his role model, and exploring pure colour in glowing combinations. Avery applied his turpsthinned paint in flat areas, staining the canvas as if with watercolour. The inky richness of 'Morning Sky' is actually painted with oil, but examine it closely and it really does look like watercolour. In fact, Avery did create actual watercolours. His practice was to make drawings with colour notes directly from the landscape, then watercolours, while the oils were done back in the studio. He could be just as effective working in oil on paper. 'Weirs' has some of the strangeness of a Prunella Clough invention, while 'Southern Sea' has all the extravagance of a major painting.
Avery is an extraordinary colourist, most notably here in the pomegranate and turquoise of 'Sunset Sea', but as a draughtsman he is rather limited. Look at the blank faces and unconvincing limbs of the figures that sometimes stray into his pictures. The sketchiness of their treatment is scarcely convincing. When a composition features a horse or a cow, as do two paintings in this show, Avery is more interested in the pictorial use he can make of a large white shape than in accurately evoking an animal. Generally speaking, his brushmarks are less descriptive than textural, for colour is the real subject here.
The most abstract pictures are thus the most successful. When Avery can indulge freely in calligraphic swirls and scratchings and sustain the wonderful brushy quality which animates his rather dry surfaces, then he is a painter of real presence and originality. A painting entitled 'Blue Forest' could easily be a seascape — the subject matters less than the poetic deployment of colour. (In this lack of specificity, Avery again recalls Aitchison. In any number of Aitchison's pictures of the Crucifixion, the animal that bears witness to the Passion could easily he read as a dog or a goat or a sheep.) What matters about 'Blue Forest' is that its surface has the variety and inventiveness of texture more readily associated with the Surrealists. It looks almost printed, rather than painted; printed in some singular and ingenious way. Yet it's simply a masterly bit of painting. Similarly, the pulsing central brown-and-green rhythm of 'Autumn', all flowing horizontals like a river in spate, is expertly varied in other parts of the picture by free hatching and swift, brisk vertical strokes.
A measure of Avery's skill is the way in which he manages to maintain a pictorially tense balance between simplicity and sophistication. Although his pictures seem entirely spontaneous, they are in fact very carefully considered. Look at the brilliantly judged and exquisitely disposed green patches in 'Dark Mountain'. Avery knows and loves the idea of land or sea, and this knowledge of its essence allows him to employ a visual shorthand far more effective than straightforward description. This abbreviated phrasing gives us such successes as 'Pink Meadow' or 'Mountain and Lake'.
Avery achieves an unusually convincing kind of pictorial space, the reverse of traditional perspectival space, perhaps because he arrives at it intuitively through the sure placing of colour. As Rothko wrote: 'Avery was a great poet-inventor who had invented sonorities never seen nor heard before. From these we have learned much and will learn more for a long time to come.' In the end, it's the focused naturalness of Milton Avery, the inevitability of his colours and forms, that wins the day.
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