Word: painterly
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...door. I think only someone with no imagination can imagine him." One would like to read this as an equivalent to Mozart's A Musical Joke or dialogue from the theater of the absurd. In fact, the German-born author, 66, is best known as a painter and playwright with an intellectual kinship to Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco...
...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...
This sense of dislocation is deepened by the knowledge that William Wharton is the pseudonym of an obscure, publicity-shy American painter who served with the Army in World War II. How much of the book is autobiography? Probably a good deal. Generally, the more one learns about novelists, the more one realizes how little they make up from scratch. Those who believe in fiction, however, will find such matters of secondary interest. Will Knott, who sketches his surroundings on the backs of K-ration boxes, speaks to William Wharton's ideal reader when he says that his drawing...