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Milton Avery Seaside Strollers, 1963 oil on canvas board 22 x 28 in. I like to seize the one sharp instant in nature, to imprison it by means of ordered shapes and space relationships. To this end I eliminate and simplify, leaving apparently nothing but color and pattern. I am not seeking pure abstraction; rather the purity and essence of the idea--expressed in its simplest form. 1 Milton Avery, 1951 Milton Avery has been called America's Matisse.2 Certainly his use of saturated colors and simplified form recall the French master's Fauve style of painting. But Avery himself did not think he painted at all like Matisse, whose art was a bit too hedonistic for his American sense of taste.3 Avery's view of nature was more pragmatic than idealistic; he sought to represent the immediate appearance of things and to avoid using artistic means for merely decorative effect.4 However close to abstraction Avery came in his use of color and his simplification of form, his art remained naturalistic, tied to his direct experience of a specific time and place. It was Avery's ability to create a sense of volume and space using color alone, instead of relying on line and texture to build up his design, that attracted the younger generation of New York painters, including Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, to his art. "Avery was one of the first to understand color as a creative means" wrote his contemporary, Hans Hofmann. "He was one of the first to relate colors in a plastic way."5 Painted in the last year of his life, Seaside Strollers exemplifies Avery's late style.6 Although Avery typically made pencil and watercolor sketches before beginning an oil painting, in these late works he went directly to the canvas. He was able to achieve a sense of immediacy by applying his pigment in thin washes of color using quick, precise brushstrokes; his oils capture the translucency and evanescence of watercolor. Avery's strict economy of means also lends poignancy to his scene. His subject matter teeters on the edge of abstraction. Without his three strollers--although barely articulated--to anchor the landscape, his four horizontal bands of color would surrender association with any recognizable sense of place. Avery's late paintings represent the culmination of his efforts to express the quintessence of form by reducing his subject matter to basic aesthetic qualities of color and shape. Megan Bahr |