“Milton Avery: Edge of Abstraction”
at Knoedler & Company, New York.
November 10, 1999–January 22, 2000

“Ripeness is all,” Shakespeare reminds us, invoking both age and timeliness. “Milton Avery: Edge of Abstraction,” an outstanding show of fifteen of the artist’s late works at Knoedler, records the timely encounter of a mature sensibility with the comparatively youthful experiments of the New York School. Avery (1885–1965) was already in his seventies when he began pushing his heretofore representational paintings toward abstraction, giving the lie to the notion that innovation visits only the young. He was born to the first modernist generation (in the same year as Ezra Pound) and was influenced by Cézanne and Matisse. Neither an ideologue nor a joiner of schools, he avoided many of the fashionable artistic movements of his time. Despite his commitment to representationa ...

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