The Quiet One

Milton Avery was a man of few words. "Why talk when you can paint?" he once remarked. And paint he did, often rising at 5 or 6 a.m. to turn out a few sketches before he had his morning coffee. He sketched the Connecticut meadows in bitter winter cold, the dunes and sea of Provincetown under midsummer sun, and Central Park in every season. By the time he approached his easel, his imagination was so disciplined by incessant drawing that on a good day he could finish off three paintings by evening.

Pruning Nature. Avery's painting vocabulary was every bit as spare as his speech, a fact handsomely demonstrated in a retrospective currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum. The first since his death in 1965, it was organized by the National Collection of Fine Arts, will move on to the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts. Avery reduced nature to its bones, pruning away all details until what remained was only the fundamental contours. In Avery's world, the landscape and the figure are treated as equals, each counting for the same weight in the picture. Thus, a nude lying on the sand stretches out into the horizon, literally as large as the land. A solitary seagull plunging to its death is frozen midway between sea and sky, as timeless as both. All of this serves to make Avery's paintings often seem curiously akimbo, as if somehow he had upset the balance of nature.

Yet he never denied nature its due. The peculiar shape of a Provincetown dune, playful as a paper hat beside the sea, was enough to inspire the surprising landscape, Dunes and Sea II. Birds particularly caught his imagination, perhaps because their sense of weightlessness corresponded so perfectly to his style. Sea Birds on Sand Bar was painted on Cape Cod in the summer of 1960. With only a few brush strokes, Avery plainly described the sea, the birds, the sand bar, even while delicately suggesting the fragility of life.

The haunting seascapes of Cape Cod are Avery's most memorable works. But his daughter March, his wife Sally, even the family dog Picasso, all managed to get into his pictures with delightful frequency. A cock crowing to the skies could stir him to chuckling humor, while the mere thought of fruit trees bursting into bloom was enough to inspire the pink color fantasy Spring Orchard. And when he tired of all other subjects, his wife remembers, he turned to himself, never failing to find something funny. One time he portrayed himself as a hobo in red ear muffs and raunchy tweed coat, another time as a wizened old man of the sea with cherry nose and stocking cap, and in still another he appears, a rumpled figure only just up, standing beside his bathroom. Overall, his subjects were "a domestic, unheroic cast," observed the late Mark Rothko, who was one of Avery's most devoted admirers and whose own art sprang from the same deep wellspring of silence. "But from these there have been fashioned great canvases that far from the casual and transitory implications of the subjects, have always a gripping lyricism."

Tart Colors. Success was slow in coming. Born in 1893 in Altmar, N.Y., Avery spent his youth in Hartford, Conn., and never gave art a thought until he heard that commercial artists could make $200 a week--a princely income in those days. He enrolled-at the Y.M.C.A. The lettering course was full, and so he signed up for a drawing class instead. It was his only formal training, but it was enough: he had fallen in love with art. In 1925, he joined an artist's colony at Gloucester, Mass., where he met another aspiring young artist named Sally Michel, and married her soon after. Through the ensuing years, Sally supported the family with her illustrations for the children's page of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, freeing Milton to spend his days painting. "I used to tease him and say that his greatest patron was the Times," she says.

Though he won little public acclaim until late in his life, Avery was early known as an artist's artist. His Manhattan studio became a gathering place for many newcomers, among them Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. Avery and friends sketched frequently at each other's homes. Seated Blonde resulted from one such session in 1946, when the model turned out to be a strapping 6-ft. beauty named Stella, daughter of that week's host. Avery combined pink with burnt sienna, magenta and crimson, with all the jangling dissonance of half a dozen crashing cymbals. It is this bravado with color that has often led him to be viewed as a kind of American Matisse.

There are similarities, to be sure. Color was the mainspring for both artists, and both treated objects as elements in a pattern. But there are also profound differences. Where Matisse's colors are voluptuous, ripe, filled with the warmth of the Mediterranean, Avery's are tart, eccentric, northern. "Matisse was a hedonist," Sally observes. "Milton was a puritanical man of very simple tastes." His uniquely charming celebration of the world around him, with its dry mirth and insistent individuality, is the legacy of an artist who was in every sense strictly his own man.

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