Word: matissean
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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