Milton Avery grew up as a painter in the days of the American Scene movement, with its advocacy of an art that would concentrate on American life and shun esoteric influences. A very set his face against this, yet the atmosphere created by that movement may have helped confirm him in his acceptance of himself. However misguided and even obscurantist the American Scene tendency was, it did at least urge in principle that the American artist come to terms with the ineluctable conditions of his development; it did remind him that he could not jump out of his skin; and it did prepare for the day when he would stop bewailing the fact that he lived where he did.

In any case, Avery started off from American art before the American Scene was heard of; in Hartford, where he grew up, he looked harder at Ryder and some of the American Impressionists than at anything in French art. And when he went on to assimilate certain French influences the outcome was still some of the most unmistakably and authentically American art that I, for one, have seen.

Avery himself would be the last to sec any aesthetic value in Americanness as such. If his art is so self-evidently American it is because it so successfully bodies forth the truth about himself and his condition, not because he has ever made an issue of his national identity. And it may also be because he developed, owing to circumstances he only half-chose, within what was to a great extent a non-European frame of reference. There arc, moreover, different kinds of Americanness, and Avery’s kind may be more apparent than others at this moment only because it had had less of a chance, before the advent of Fauvism, to express itself in ambitious, sophisticated painting.

Frederick S. Wight, in his text for the catalogue of Avery’s retrospective at the Baltimore Museum in December 1952, put his finger on one of the most salient traits of Avery’s art: its insistence on nature as a thing of surface alone, not of masses or volumes, and as accessible solely through eyes that refrained from making tactile associations. Avery’s is the opposite of what is supposed to be a typical American attitude in that he approaches nature as a subject rather than as an object. One does not manipulate a subject, one meets it. On the other hand, his employment of abstract means for ends-which, however, subtly or subduedly naturalistic, are nevertheless intensely sois nothing if not American. I see something similar in four other American artists who belong to twentieth-century modernism: Dove, Arnold Friedman, Hartley and Marin. And it is significant that except for Friedman these painters, though they all flirted with Cubism once it was on the scene, continued to find in Fauvism the kind of modernism most congenial to themselves-which is also true of Allied Maurer, if in a different way.

The original French Fauves were usually ready to sacrifice the facts of nature for a happy decorative effect; whereas these Americans tended to let the decorative effect go when it threatened to depart too much from the facts. It was in the facts primarily that they found inspiration, and when they did not find it there they were liable (at least Dove, Marin and Hartley were) to succumb to artiness. There was a certain diffidence in this attitude: unlike Matisse, the American Fauves did not proclaim themselves sovereigns of nature. But there was also a certain courage: they clung to the truth of their own very personal experience, however intimate, modest, or unenhanceable that truth was. This applies to Avery in particular. No matter how much he simplifies or eliminates, he almost always preserves the local, nameable identity of his subject; it never becomes merely a pretext. Nor is art ever for him the peculiarly transcendent issue it often becomes for Hartley and Marin.

There is no glamor in Avery’s art; it is daring, but it is not emphatic or spectacular in its daring. In part this may have to do with the concrete elements of his painting: the absence of pronounced value contrasts on the one hand, and of intense color on the other; the neutral surface that betrays neither “paint quality” nor brushwork. But it has even more to do with his temperament, his diffidence. Fifteen years ago, reviewing one of his shows at Paul Rosenberg’s in The Nation, while I admired his landscapes, I gave most of my space to the derivativeness of the figure pieces that made up the bulk of the show, and if I failed to discern how much there was in these that was not Matisse, it was not only because of my own imperceptiveness, but also because the artist himself had contrived not to call enough attention to it.

I still quarrel with Avery’s figure pieces, or at least with most of them. Too often their design fails to be total: figures are not locked securely enough in place against their backgrounds, which are so often blank ones. And for all the inspired distortion and simplification of contour, factual accidents of the silhouette will intrude in a way that disrupts the flat patterning which is all.important to this kind of painting. It is as though A very had trouble handling dis placeable objects when they exceeded a certain size, and found his certainty only in depicting things that had grown into the places they occupied and which provided foregrounds and backdrops that interlocked of their own accord. In other words, he is generally at his best in landscape and seascape.

It is difficult to account for the individuality of Avery’s art. In detail it echoes many other painters-Matisse, Dufy, Hartley (who was himself influenced by A very in the end), even Marin but these echoes do not lead toward Avery’s specific results, his pictorial unities. It is not a question of schools or styles, or even of sensibility, but of something even more personal. There is the sublime lightness of A very’ s hand on the one side, and the morality of his eyes on the other: the exact loyalty of these eyes to what they experience. The question has to do with exactly how Avery locks his flat, lambent planes together; with the exact dosage of light in his colors (all of which seem to have some admixture of white); with exactly how he manages to keep his pictures cool in key even when using the warmest hues; with exactly how he inflects planes into depth without shading, and so on. Of course, all successful art confronts us with this factor of exactness, but rarely does the necessity of exactness cover as much as it does in Avery’s case.

Nature is flattened and aerated in his painting, but not deprived in a final sense of its substantiality, which is restored to it-it could be said-by the artistic solidity of the result. The picture floats but it also coheres and stays in place, as tight as a drum and as open as light. Through the unreal means most specific to pictorial art, the flat plane parallel to the surface, Avery conveys the integrity of nature better than the Cubists could with their own kind of emphasis on flat parallel planes. And whereas Cubism had to eventuate in abstraction, Avery has developed and expanded his art without having either to court or ward off that possibility. As it happens, he is one of the very few modernists of note in his generation to have disregarded Cubism. It would be hazardous to say that he has not been affected by it in any way, but it certainly has not had an important part in his formation, and he has flouted the Cubist canon of the well-made picture almost as much as Clyfford Still has.

Like almost every other modernist reaction against Impressionism, Avery’s Fauvism has but drawn a further consequence of it. His art is an extremer version of a world from which sculpture and all allusions to the sculptural have been banished, a world in which reality is solely optical. But what marks off Avery’s painting within modernism itself is its explicit rejection of the decorative-a rejection given its point, as it is in Matisse’s case, by the fact that Avery’s means are so very decorative in themselves. If decoration can be said to be the specter that haunts modernist painting, then part of the latter’s formal mission is to find ways of using the decorative against itself. It is as though Late Impressionism and Fauvism have come on the order of the day again precisely because, being so much more antisculptural and therefore exposed to the decorative than Cubism, they dramatize the problem by increasing the tension between decorative means and nondecorative ends.

Matisse and the later Monet overcame decoration by their success in achieving the monumental; they established size as well as scale as an absolute aesthetic factor. Avery seems never to have considered this solution. Perhaps it would have taken him too far away from his conception of nature, which could be rendered only through the easel, not the wall, paint-ing; a large picture can give us images of things, but a relatively small one can best recreate the instantaneous unity of nature as a view-the unity of that which the eyes take in at a single glance. (This, even more than their revulsion against the academic “machine,” seems to me to account for the size of canvas, averaging two feet by one and a half, that the Impressionists favored.) Though A very converses with decoration in a way that would have shocked Pissarro, and in going from sketch to finished canvas distorts nature expressively, he is moved nevertheless by a naturalism not too unlike that which guaranteed Pissarro, as it did not Monet, against the pejoratively decorative.

That the younger “anti-Cubist” abstract painters who admire Avery do not share his naturalism has not prevented them from learning from him any more than it has prevented them from admiring him. His art demonstrates how sheer truth of feeling can galvanize what seem the most inertly decorative elements-a tenuous flatness; pure, largely valueless contrasts of hue; large, unbroken tracts of uniform color; an utter, unaccented simplicity of design-into tight and dramatic unities in which the equivalents of the beginning, middle and end of the traditional easel picture are fully sensed. His painting shows once again how relatively indifferent the concrete means of art become where force of feeling takes over.

Painters and even collectors have paid more attention, so far, to Avery than critics or museum people have, and his reputation is not yet a firmly established one. Perhaps it is because he has been so badly selected and shown by his dealers. But it may also be because of that subtleness to which his exactness is so important. When subtleness as such becomes an important issue, the usual implication is that the art in question does not excel by its range. And the question does suggest itself whether Avery’s art, for all its real variety, does not tend to be somewhat narrow in its impact. Such a limitation might explain why Avery, like Marin, and like Paul Nash in England, has proved unexportable so far. But one hesitates to accept this explanation, just as one hesitates to accept the idea of unexportability in general. There are certain seascapes Avery painted in Provincetown in the summers of 1957 and 1958 that I would expect to stand out in Paris, or Rome or London just as much as they do in New York.