At the Whitney, a retrospective that does not mask his limits
Those Those who who like like artists artists with with dramatic dramatic lives (hot, heavy, conflict-ridden ear-cutters or their SoHo clones) will be dis appointed by Milton Avery's. No major American artist has a thinner dossier. 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, clobbered no body in the Cedar Bar 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 birth date from 1885 to 1893, so that he would not seem an old fogy to the young art student, Sally Michel, whom he met in a rooming house in Gloucester, Mass., in 1924, courted and married. He was a man of ab solute 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 80th 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 is a delectable fragment. It will also provide plenty of fuel for reassessment. Nobody could call Avery a neglected painter, but he did work against neglected painter, but he did work against the grain. In the '30s and '40s his Matissean aesthetic and his refusal to paint "social" subjects, whether of the left, like Ben Shahn, or of the right, like Thomas Hart Benton, made him an outsider in the art world; no small irony, since this son of a New York State country tanner struggled his whole life against pauperism. 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 70 and at the peak of his talent, his prices were about one-tenth of Pollock's. (They still are, but Pollock's 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 largely derived from Avery's landscapes. Avery's influence on American abstract painting in the '50s and '60s, 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 rilling 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 '60s. So did his liking for dilute, discreetly modulated washes of pure pigment that stained the canvas rather than sat on it.