November 12, 2025
Milton Avery
Karma | 549 West 26th Street
Through December 20, 2025
Jumping ahead to 26th Street (I’ll circle back), another show to file under both “bananas” and “museum-quality” is “The Figure,” an expansive survey of Milton Avery’s still-jolting paintings, spanning the 1920s to 1964. The American artist is best known for the compositions of flat and simplified interlocking forms in seriously piquant and moodily unexpected palettes—the “Avery style,” a distinct approach settled on in the ’40s, was shared by his wife Sally Michel and later his daughter, March, both painters (as well as frequent subjects). The unchronological burst of canvases that kicks things off at Karma proves Milton didn’t always work this way, as do the wildcards peppered throughout, but his color sense always gives him away. In works from the ’30s, the “whites” of a man’s eyes are painted bright cerulean in a portrait otherwise rendered in sand and plum; a giant baby, of blaring bubblegum, is tended to by its blue-green mother against a ground of pea soup, and so on. While there are flashes of Picasso and Matisse everywhere, Avery borrows from them specific tricks and freedoms, not a logic. And because he painted without fealty to a movement (even as the New York School blossomed around him) his work remains hard to place in history. It’s the deep, unaffiliated eccentricity of his jigsaw-puzzle, out-of-scale compositions (including many curiously lovely domestic and seaside scenes) that make the canvases feel almost contemporary.
