Word: matissean
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...lamps clasped in the fangs of ornate snake-candelabra, or coyly veiled in rice paper (wasn’t it Woody Allen who used a red light bulb as a sexual expedient in Annie Hall?). On the far wall hang paintings of frolicking figures in prurient postures, Matissean dancers in revelry. Overhead, Starck-sleek fans of brushed steel revolve with drawing-room languor, conspicuously at odds with the clamor and chatter below. And diffusing throughout the room, holding the whole tenuously cohesive mess together, there is slinky drum-and-bass music to vegetate...
...rather than preserve, in abstraction, the choice of "figure" and "background." In the best of her '50s work, like Blue Level, 1955, the play of raggy shapes and roughly sliced strips of burlap has an impacted pictorial density. She wanted to combine Picassoan drawing, gestural and probing, with Matissean color. There are direct homages to Matisse in the show, like the lacy cut-paper silhouettes of Blue and Black, 1951-53; and the Picassoan body surfaces too, a fleshy phantom, as in Visitation, 1957-73, an allusion, it seems, to Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror...
...fraction of this output. But it is a delectable fragment. It will also provide plenty of fuel for reassessment. Nobody could call Avery a neglected painter, but he did work against neglected painter, but he did work against the grain. In the '30s and '40s his Matissean aesthetic and his refusal to paint "social" subjects, whether of the left, like Ben Shahn, or of the right, like Thomas Hart Benton, made him an outsider in the art world; no small irony, since this son of a New York State country tanner struggled his whole life against pauperism. Later...
Nobody else, for instance, can bring off the mixture of lavish Matissean col or, literary irony and veiled narrative - like disconnected stills from a Fritz Lang film - from which R.B. Kitaj, in such works as Malta (1974), constructs a new form of history-painting. There is no American equivalent to the cold edgy handling (nightmare as literature, so to speak) in paintings by the Italian Valerio Adami. But the difference especially comes out in "domestic" figurative painting, which seems more complex and problematical - more difficult of approach - in Europe than in America. Hence the extraordinary flavor of the nudes...
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