Milton Avery is an example of an advance-guard painter who has achieved the highest success without having his work properly understood. The leading artist of the most distinguished dealer in America, Paul Rosenberg, Picasso’s dealer, he stands at the peak of success in art circles, his work selling on equal grounds with the most distinguished Europeans. Yet his success is based on a complete misunderstanding of his work and of his statement as a painter. Avery has been popularized among collectors and critics as a great painter of charm, as whimsical, as a man of impeccable taste who paints in flat color without line, the great American “fauvist.” This lesser position, which makes him a disciple of Matisse, has acted as a boomerang with fellow painters, who feel that his new work is thin, pretty, posterlike, that he is painting in this new way because it is salable, and that he has become a light escapist. This angle of whimsy has been welcomed by his dealers, who use it to talk away his distortions and unconventionalities so that they can capitalize on his sensuous appeal. The result has been that to the public, to the critics, and to many of his fellow artists, Avery has become a decorative painter of sweetness and charm. The fact is that Avery is one of the most important painters who has come out of America, who has done much to clarify the artistic problems of American painting, and who has been a leader in the fight that the American painter has had to undergo to free himself from the realism, the chauvinist isolationism, and the provincialism of American art. He has raised American painting to a level of equality with the work of Europeans, both those in Europe and those who fled Europe to come to America.

The key to understanding Avery’s work can be found if we analyze the change of attitude that has taken place among all those painters who formerly were his admirers and who now object to the direction of his new work. It is useless to try to clear away the journalistic attitude that forms the basis of his popular acclaim among collectors.

To a certain extent the attitude of painters toward his new work is understandable because the dealers have shown only a part of it, that part which they feel is completely salable and involves no risk at all. These dealers feel that the public knows what to expect from Avery, and they feed it exactly that part. Yet even the genre landscapes that form the bulk of the work shown at Durand-Ruel and Rosenberg is so characteristic of his statement that an objective approach toward it should make clear what Avery’s statement is.

Avery started out on the American art scene as an expressionist. His work was somber, biting, full of personal feeling, and expressed with a directness that immediately set him off as the bold leader of a new American tendency. When he came on the scene, most American painters were still under the influence of Cézanne. With the exception of Weber and Maurer, who had lived in Paris and were trying to for themselves into the prevailing movements there, most American painters were fumbling in an attempt to stay in the modern movement, to keep out of the clutches of the American Scene school. The dominating influence was the painting of Cézanne, van Gogh, and Renoir. They, together with Degas, were at that time being introduced to the American public, and they furnished the only roots from which American painters could gather inspiration. Some in desperation became out-and-out followers of Picasso; but it was an unsatisfactory way out, because Picasso was not understood, and his style was so crystallized that to be influenced by him meant to copy him. Expressionism came as a long sought-forsolution, for it was possible for the individual to express his own personality within the tolerant freedoms of that movement, so that even if a painter did not find the secret of art, he could discover at least the secrets of his own personality. Since artistic creation tends to move from self-exploration to abstract thinking—that is, from a contemplation of one’s own personal reaction to the phenomena to the creation of phenomena—expressionism was a very important step in the evolution of the American artist. Milton Avery played a very important role of leadership in that movement, setting the pace for the free exploration of the painting medium in order to discover its expressive powers, its possibilities for evoking emotion, and to make the medium function within itself.

Contrary to prevalent opinion, Avery’s latest work is the logical outcome of this early direction. He has learned to get rid of personal sentiment, personal feeling, to arrive at the feel of statement where his achievement is more universal.

His work has an abandon, a nihilist explosiveness, a Dionysian orgy of freedom that is overwhelming. In front of an Avery canvas one no longer participates in a communion with the personal reaction of one human being toward nature. It is no longer a question of reaction; it is a question of participating in the moment of communion. To achieve it, Avery creates a world of his own. It is significant in this connection that he no longer works from models or paints directly from nature, changing it to fit his personal feelings toward the subject. He now works from sketches, sketches made of models and of nature, that give him the complete freedom to express an abstract idea.

Strangely enough, Avery’s statement is not at all as the critics claim—whimsical, humorous, or satiric. For no great painting has ever had these elements. On the contrary, Avery’s work is tragic in the Greek definition of tragedy, an orgiastic display of color and forms that express his love of freedom. Those who, looking at this work, can see only its charm and its sensuous display, missing its more deeply felt connotations, are like the early Christians who, looking on at the primitive expressions of tragic ceremonies typified in Western Europe by the bacchanale, saw in the bacchanale only an irreligious exercise of lust.