Everywhere in America, one sees the same Main Street, same Sears, same Coca-Cola, same chain drugstore, same fried shrimp and the same local museum reflecting in a lesser way the same big museum. Instead of venturing to the "big museums" this November for whatever universal art they are highlighting, search for a more intimate American vision "'bury"ed closer than you think.
A group of important and rarely seen paintings and works on paper by the American master Milton Avery will be on display Nov. 4 through 29 at the Alpha Gallery on Newbury Street in Boston. The exhibition, "Milton Avery and the Sea," presents the domesticity of the artist's day-to-day life: his family, their vacations at the beach, and a variety of seascapes.
Avery distills the subject's essence into compositions of abstract forms, color and pattern, without subverting the representation. In "Coney Island" (1931), Avery chooses lambent golden tones, earthen hues and dampened greens, creating an embracing background which hugs the outline of the figures, clad in inorganic store-bought clothing.
The colors are subjectively chosen and distributed, with little concern for perspective, but retain a relative closeness to reality. It is difficult to categorize the work as abstract, since it is so accessible. Avery's style embraces both awkwardness and a deliberate lack of finish combined with humor and a love of nature. In much the same way as a vacation manufactures an album of photos, each seascape or beach scene contributes a fraction to the total Avery experience. Other people's art would simply confuse, and belong in a separate album.
The artist's roots lie in the conjunction of American Regionalism, European Impressionism and the simplified shapes of Henri Matisse. Avery bridges late 19th century Folk Art with Modernism's concern for light and the transitory. This is where the Alpha Gallery is essential in isolating Avery, since his work placed against the Impressionists' will appear differently than his work placed against the Folk.
Avery's paintings create a new kind of environment, a radiant primitivism, obscured by innovative geometries and color relationships. It is a uniquely "impressed-and-folk" oeuvre, not limited to either/or, and not imitated by any other American painter.
The structure of Avery's painting concerns itself with the material of everyday life, for which he invented his own expressive and stylistic alphabet. The artist honed in and selected specific parts of a scene to emphasize - a shape, a piece of clothing, a certain network of colors - as though it were to be taken home, stored on the canvas and commodified as a souvenir.
Avery is attempting to recreate a felt state through cropped forms and subjective colors. The way the subject bends, her mannerism, may be more indicative of the felt state than how real the water looks or how blue the sky is. And maybe next time, it is the curve of the sail, the exact radius, which stores the memory, leaving no reason to play up the surrounding water and otherlands. Either way, Avery deals with real places in time, real feelings. He selects from certain environments the pieces that should be emphasized.
At the start, his work was considered radical for being so abstract; when Abstract Expressionism became dominant, his work was overlooked, being too representational. The authorities have since rewritten his history as having heavily impacted the Abstract Expressionists, yet he embraced Folk, revised Impressionism, birthed Color Field painting, demolished linear perspective, and championed the everyday life.
Avery killed the Realist, yet ventured into their style more than they did. He befriended major artists, yet was quiet and had no friends. He loved Matisse and hated him, but has been called the American version. He was revered by artists like Mark Rothko, loved Picasso - but Matisse more - and then died during the Civil Rights movement.
A sustaining joy is embedded in the works of Milton Avery; they are heartening and beautiful. The seascapes which Alpha presents have a nostalgic New England reticence, a time before the town adopted the dialects of "The Departed." But for the delicate and sensitive human in us all, Avery prescribed a loyalty to nature and beauty, a refined aesthetic intelligence. He can make you feel six or 80, but nothing in between.
