Seaside, (1931)
Milton Avery
The Figure at KARMA
​By Tom McGlynn
New York, November 20, 2025
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Milton Avery’s comprehensive oeuvre is a gift to the legacy of American painting that just keeps on giving. This extensive exhibition featuring his work with figures puts a lie to Clement Greenberg’s assertion that his main strength was in landscapes. As he explains his position one discerns, unsurprisingly, a certain prejudice of the critic toward a totalizing unity of form:
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“I still quarrel with Avery’s figures, or at least with most of them. Too often their design fails to be total: figures 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.” 1
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To the contemporary viewer it is exactly the odd disjunctions and tectonic shifts in Avery’s figures, constantly moving under or over figure-ground relationships, that seem so fresh and unsettling. Compare this body of work to a spatially disjunctive painter like Peter Doig, for instance, or to the overlapping morphology of figures and grounds in Kathy Bradford’s work. One gets the sense that Avery was essentially making things up as he went along, rather than going for a total vision of planar cohesion. It’s exactly this kind of painterly “thinking on one’s feet” that keeps his work perennially engaging.
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Avery hailed from humble, parochial roots in upstate New York and supported an extended family network through a series of blue-collar jobs. Yet after moving to New York City with his artist wife, Sally Michel, and studying at The Art Students League during the 1920s and 1930s, his distinctive painterly voice began to emerge. Crucial financial and institutional support soon followed: The Phillips Collection in Washington purchased a work in 1929, and the investment banker and modern art patron Roy Neuberger acquired one in 1943. Neuberger would go on to collect a hundred of Avery’s paintings over the course of his life. It is worth considering that Avery’s long period of painterly “yeoman-ship”, though arduous, ultimately enabled him to forge an extraordinarily original synthesis of figuration and abstraction, some prime examples of which are on view here.
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1 Clement Greenberg , Milton Avery, Arts Magazine, December 1957.
Sailor's Bar (circa 1930)
Pink Baby (1933)
A selection of canvases from the early 1930s evinces a strong familiarity with Picasso’s early figurative work, paintings such as Untitled (Woman Smoking) (1930) and Two Nudes (1939). Concurrently Avery was painting wildly original compositions such as Sailor’s Bar (1930) and Pink Baby (1933). In both of the latter examples one sees the familiar odd distortions of figurative form (a pneumatic infant overseen by a much flatter mother in hieroglyphic profile, for instance) and specific color schemes that characterized the artist’s peculiar style into his late work. In Seaside (1931) and Children at Seaside (1935) the beach theme that Avery would make one of his major leitmotifs emerges. The first painting is an almost Theodore Rousseau-esque tribute to symbolist simplicity depicting a schematic family group on a surreal strand, the second is more typical of the artist’s signature “childhood puzzle piece” compositions in tones of deep blue and varying values of undersaturated orange. In the 1940s Avery continued to experiment with an astonishing range of styles. While Table Tennis (1940s) harkens back to the skewed perspective and distorted figures of Sailor’s Bar, and what appears to be a portrait of an artist (apparently not Avery) painting a vase of flowers in The Artist Constant (1940) has an oddly scratched-in female head hovering above on the wall behind. The painting emits an R. Crumb vibe that lends it a very contemporary feel, as well as a passing affinity with Dana Schutz’s hyperbolic caricatures and Nicole Eisenman’s often backlit figurative forms. Hence, like Philip Guston, Avery’s inventive solutions to painting that are at once narratively charged, optically luscious and materially scrappy have proven to be also temporally unbound.
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The inspired way that the exhibition is organized, in roughly synchronous time periods hung, to a large extent, salon style, creates an atmosphere of engaged exploration, as if each grouping is an arrangement of painterly confections beckoning the viewer to unselfconsciously indulge. Some real standouts are among the various works, including Morning Talk (1963) which depicts a woman on a green chair in a large red dress conversing with another all in white on a muted yellow couch. One doesn’t have to imagine the speaker here as Avery subtly indicates who with closely observed body language. The bold color of that red dress is obviously holding sway. At the same time it exudes a domestic familiarity; the painting maintains a monumental, almost Cycladic, simplicity. Similarly, an earlier work, Young Musician (1945), organizes a reclining feminine form (the artist’s daughter, March) amidst a guitar, mandolin and strewn sheet music in schematic monumentality. Its softer hues of green, orange and gray arrange the canvas in a harmonic reverie appropriate to its supine subject. Avery’s family and domestic scenes seemed to have served the same purpose as Giorgio Morandi’s collections of vases, bottles and boxes. That is, as familiar subjects for very unfamiliar and extraordinarily delicate compositions and color harmonics. Avery’s assembled figure works here, however, provide evidence of a painter possessed of a much more effervescent temperament.
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All images: © 2025 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Karma
Two Nudes (1939)