Word: painterly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...birth date from 1885 to 1893, so that he would not seem an old fogy to the young art student, Sally Michel, whom he met in a rooming house in Gloucester, Mass., in 1924, courted and married. He was a man of ab solute dedication and conviction, a painter who did almost nothing but paint; the result was an enormous oeuvre, usually a painting a day until heart trouble slowed him down in 1949 and killed him, in his 80th year...
...some 150 Avery oils and watercolors, organized by Barbara Haskell to open the Whitney Museum's fall season, can show only a 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...
...regard Avery as a potentially abstract painter who could not quite summon up the courage to drop content was one of the minor illusions of the '60s. Avery was uncompromisingly a figurative artist, like his mentors: Matisse and to some extent Picasso in Europe, and in America such painters as Ryder (with his visionary seascapes) and Twachtman. What his best works offer is a very American sense of Arcadia, a hard-won paradise of the natural world reconstructed in terms of color. Shape is reduced to the minimum: some flat silhouettes, relatively little internal texture...
...deplore the injustice art fashion did to Avery without, however, going to the opposite extreme of making him into a Yankee Matisse, a painter (in the recent words of Critic Hilton Kramer) comparable to late Turner and late Cézanne, displaying "the kind of archetypal grandeur and sweep that is to be found only among the masterworks of modern art." Of Avery's power as a colorist, there is no reasonable doubt. The only way not to feel it in the Whitney is to wear sunglasses. But Avery as draftsman? The color weaves a seamless fabric of pleasure...
...picture is modeled after Hommage à Delacroix by Henri Fantin-Latour, who in 1864 lined up seven artists, including Manet and Whistler, and three writers, including Baudelaire, who had been Delacroix's admirers. Fantin-Latour then judiciously posed them beside a portrait of the great French Romantic painter. The composition is as simple as the relationships. Soyer, on the other hand, chose a much more difficult situation to compose. He selected ten realist artists for his Homage, including Edward Hopper, Jack Levine, Leonard Baskin, Reginald Marsh and himself. Also portrayed was Soyer's twin brother Moses, a lesser...