Milton Avery: American Colourist, now open at the Royal Academy of Arts, is the renowned American artist’s first solo exhibition in a European public institution. Covering the full development of Avery’s career, the survey features a careful selection of 70 works, including many of his celebrated paintings from 1910 to the 1960s.
Milton Avery (1885-1965) has long been recognised in the USA as one of the most important and influential 20th century American artists. Avery’s compositions, taken from daily life and which include portraits and landscapes, are imbued with a colour sensibility, harmony and balance which were to have a major influence on the next artistic generation. Avery played a vital role in the development of Abstract Expressionism through his close association with some of the younger exponents of the movement, such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb. His work defies distinct categorisation, stretching between American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, both of which had a significant impact on his oeuvre, although he was not formally associated with either movement.
Milton Avery: American Colourist opens with the artist’s early work, from 1910 to the late 1930s. These pictures, a number receiving their first public display, suggest the artist’s main themes: the landscape, the city and the domestic, and also show the influence of the American Impressionists.
A short period of portraiture followed, with pictures of family, friends and self-portraits. Paintings such as The Dessert (1939, New York, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)) and Self-Portrait (1941, Purchase, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York) feature in this exhibition.
In Innovation in Colour and Form, the exhibition charts a period from the mid-1940s when Avery developed a system of flattening the compositional forms of his paintings into abstracted tonal planes. It was this development that established him as a major American colourist. Key works in this section include two portraits of his daughter March, Seated Girl with Dog (1944, Purchase, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York) and March in Brown (1954, Private collection).
The exhibition closes with an examination of Avery’s late work, from the 1950s to the early 1960s. The paintings reveal a continuing influence of European Modernism, particularly of Henri Matisse, as Avery increasingly employed non-associative colours in his compositions. In paintings such as Black Sea (1959, Washington, Phillips Collection) and Boathouse by the Sea (1959, New York, Milton Avery Trust), we see how Avery perfected his unique ability to balance colour and form in increasingly abstracted compositions.
Having exerted such a profound influence on the young emerging colour field Abstract Expressionist painters, Avery also took much from them – with his scale increasing and these late works becoming less dependent on the figurative content. Mark Rothko said of Avery in his memorial address in 1965: “There have been several others in our generation who have celebrated the world around them, but none with that inevitability where the poetry penetrated every pore of the canvas to the very last touch of the brush.”
Milton Avery: American Colourist is now open at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and runs until 16 October. The exhibition is organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
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Image: Milton Avery, Little Fox River, 1942, oil on canvas, 91.8 x 122.2cm, Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift of Roy R Neuberger, Photo: Jim Frank © 2022 Milton Avery Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2022