“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 representational painting, in the Thirties he shunned politically inflected styles such as American Scene painting and Social Realism. Avery’s idiosyncratic path led him instead to influence and be influenced by a later generation of modernists, the Abstract Expressionists. He formed relationships with Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb long before they found success as artists.
To Avery, abstraction meant abstracting from nature, paring it down; he eschewed purely non-objective painting. Still, several of the works in this show might easily be taken for complete abstractions were it not for their titles. For instance, without its title Boathouse by the Sea(1959) could be seen as a study in color fields—an