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But to regard Avery as a potentially abstract painter who could not quite summon up the courage to drop content was one of the minor illusions of the '60s. Avery was uncompromisingly a figurative artist, like his mentors: Matisse and to some extent Picasso in Europe, and in America such painters as Ryder (with his visionary seascapes) and Twachtman. What his best works offer is a very American sense of Arcadia, a hard-won paradise of the natural world reconstructed in terms of color. Shape is reduced to the minimum: some flat silhouettes, relatively little internal texture.
Avery was not good at maintaining a suavely impasted surface, though sometimes he could bring one off with real subtlety the bursting fan of foam over the rocks in White Wave, 1954, is like a Monet haystack made of water, not grass. But the major Averys, like Sea and Sand Dunes, 1955, or Speedboat's Wake, 1959, are thin, taut, nearly as evanescent looking as weather itself. Their pictorial construction is achieved almost entirely through color: the weight of a red, the brooding distension of a purplish sea against a blue headland. Nothing is subordinate in such paintings, and their dialogue between feeling and repression .is like nothing else in American art.
One can deplore the injustice art fashion did to Avery without, however, going to the opposite extreme of making him into a Yankee Matisse, a painter (in the recent words of Critic Hilton Kramer) comparable to late Turner and late Cézanne, displaying "the kind of archetypal grandeur and sweep that is to be found only among the masterworks of modern art." Of Avery's power as a colorist, there is no reasonable doubt. The only way not to feel it in the Whitney is to wear sunglasses. But Avery as draftsman? The color weaves a seamless fabric of pleasure; the drawing punches large puritan holes.
As a committed modernist à la française, Avery treated the figure as a strictly formal affair: patch for the dress or bathing suit, patch for face, no detail. In the process he often produced a curious scragginess. The parts of the bodies rarely connect well, and have noli me tangere written all over them. Sometimes his lumpish ladies on the beach suggest Thurber. In Matisse, no matter how reduced the outline may be or how schematic the stroke of the crayon that says "eye," "breast" or "hip," one can almost always sense the live weight of a body, its organic relationship of part to part, its accessibility to touch. This ability to translate the presence of the physical object into abbreviated signs without sensuous loss is a precondition of good figure drawing, and Avery lacked it; his attitude was too distanced, his style too mannered and crotchety.