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His figures are really ideograms, and they tell us as little about bodies as his small gray painting of a diving sea bird tells us about gulls. Its interest is focused wholly within the color—that rich "gray," actually a complicated melding of green, gray and dark rose, which pulsates with such airy serenity around the white patch of a bird. In the same way, the human figure in Avery is a locus of color, something to carry a desired area of blue or pink. When he invested his figures with the same rhythmic sureness as the flat patches of his landscapes, as in Two Figures by the Sea, 1963, with its subtle relationships between the blues of the left figure, the dark plane of water and the putty-colored sand, the results were exquisite. But he did not always manage to; and that is why Avery, though as good a painter as any American modernist and better than most, a brave and eloquent sensibility, was not the equal of the European masters he revered. —By Robert Hughes