Milton avery

It’s hard not to feel slightly odd when standing in front of a Milton Avery painting. Take his 1943 work Hors d’Oeuvres as an example. The painting — currently on show at London’s Royal Academy’s exhibition, Milton Avery: American Colorist — is large, at nearly a meter across, and the background is what appears to be a coastal landscape, with a greenish sea and the curve of a bay appearing in the upper right-hand corner. In the foreground of the painting is a cream table and on it, a blue platter of food: the “hors d’oeuvres” of the work’s title. So far, it might be hard to understand what is so disconcerting about this painting.

‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much as he was prepared to say. Contemporary critics tried to ‘pin Matisse’ on him as if art criticism were a branch of police work. He resisted, and remains a slippery customer. Post-impressionist or abstract expressionist? Colour field painter with added figures? To those who view art history as the march of progress towards modernism, he looks like a backslider. Clement Greenberg thought as much, dismissing him in 1943 as ‘a “light” modern who can produce offspring of Marie Laurencin and Matisse that are empty and sweet with nice flat areas of colour…’ Ouch.

"Those trees are blue — I never saw a blue tree in Vermont,” a collector once argued to Milton Avery when looking at one of his New England forest scenes from 1945. The reticent artist parried: “That one was done in New Hampshire.” “Blue Trees,” the painting in question, is classic Avery (1885-1965): logically nonsensical but improbably believable, forcing us to re-question language’s tenuous hold on the slippery wonders of color. It’s also one of the standout examples included in a new retrospective of the American painter, set to open at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, Connecticut) on March 5, the middle leg of a three-venue tour.