Milton Avery

(Grace Borgenicht, February 1–27 1986)

Milton Avery's Whitney retrospective four years ago proved to us that he could make big important paintings. Most impressive was the way his flattened images, painted with no shadow or attempt at depth, floated together at the surface of the overall composition. Those paintings were about color and the abstraction of forms to new, two-dimensional arrangements with a little brushworks embellishment. Those large Whitney rooms were terrific filled with those paintings with their broad surfaces and expanses of pure color, wherein a figure or landscape was almost just an excuse for a dazzling composition of surface planes. His colors were earthier than Alex Katz's, his tones warmer and more relaxing.
    This current show, entitled "Portraits 1928–1963, Family and Friends," contains lesser work. As might be inferred from the title, these works seem to have largely been done more for the amusement of his immediate circle than for the general public. At their worst, they remind us of the caricatures hanging in suburban basements. They evoke an era for which nostalgia can be the only by-product. The works seem to have stayed in that era of Eisenhower, cold war and beatniks without permeating into the present. It's not merely that they're "out of style." When a painting is good, style is forgiven.
    In a few paintings, most notably Two Poets (1963), The Artist Constant (1940) and "Young Couple" (1963), he's risen above this immediacy of his time and forged something "in the smithy of [his] soul." These works hang in the gallery of no boundaries.
    Two works, Striped Shirt (1962) and Blue Eyed Girl (1962), though seemingly completed in fifteen minutes, would still out class anything shown in most galleries for their obvious background knowledge of technique and art history. The portrait subject of Striped Shirt has a green face, probably based on an African mask, and an upper torso portrayed with a minimum of slashed lines on bare canvas to show a turtleneck shirt. In the background is a completely other complementary landscape of a broad-brushstroked field leading back to a rising, small mountain covered in dabbed trees and, above it all, the upper edge, a blue sky. We know what the images represent, but it's only to ground us in some reality. He takes us from notion to create an other wordly version.
    Younger artists whose need to "express" allows their brushwork a fervency that supplants the formal elements of composition, would be advised to look closely at these works for their elegant and tasty control and reigning in of spontaneous gesture.

(ARTS, April 1986)