Nothing If Not Critical by Robert Hughes

Author:Robert Hughes [Hughes, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80959-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

Milton Avery

It may be that no major American artist has a thinner dossier than Milton Avery. A New York tanner’s son, a mild, unassuming man who disliked publicity and made at best a bare living from his work, he joined no groups, signed no manifestos, was linked to no political causes and said very little about himself; when asked for his theories about art, his usual reply was: “Why talk when you can paint?” It is not wholly a surprise that his family nickname was “Bunny.” Avery’s one apparent act of vanity was changing his birthdate from 1885 to 1893, so that he would not seem such an old fogy to the young art student, Sally Michel, whom he met in a rooming house in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1924, courted and married. He was a man of absolute dedication and conviction, a painter who did almost nothing but paint; the result was an enormous oeuvre, usually a painting a day until heart trouble slowed him down in 1949 and killed him, in his eightieth year, in 1965.

The retrospective of some 150 Avery oils and watercolors, organized by Barbara Haskell to open the Whitney Museum’s fall season, can show only a fraction of this output. But it will provide plenty of grounds for reassessment. Nobody could call Avery a neglected painter, but he did work against the grain. In the thirties and forties his Matissean aesthetic and his refusal to paint “social” subjects, whether of the left, as Ben Shahn, or of the right, as Thomas Hart Benton, made him an outsider in the art world. Later he would be considered rather a fuddy-duddy compared with the Abstract Expressionists, a generation behind him. He was, in that way, a victim of orthodox modernist thinking—which tended to suppose that his art had not “evolved” beyond its representational purposes, toward abstraction. In the late 1950s, when Avery was in his seventies and at the peak of his talent, his prices were about one-tenth of Pollock’s. (They still are, but Pollock’s works now cost millions.)

Other painters, however, had no illusions about his merits. Mark Rothko treated him as a master—appropriately, since Rothko’s glowing, blur-edged rectangles, now so prized as icons of American romanticism, were influenced by Avery’s landscapes. Avery’s effect on American abstract painting in the fifties and sixties, not only as a stylist but as a moral example of commitment and aesthetic ambition, was much greater than has usually been supposed. His way of filling a canvas with broad fields of color “tuned” by dispersed accumulations of detail (a cluster of rocks, a flurry of waves, a knot of seaweed, a post or two) had everything to do with the compositional procedures of color-field painting in the sixties. So did his liking for dilute, discreetly modulated washes of pure pigment that stained the canvas rather than sit on it.

But to regard Avery as a potentially abstract painter who could not quite summon up the courage to drop content was a mistake. Avery was

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