UCLA Hammer Museum
American painter Milton Avery is remembered in a rare exhibit
titled “Milton Avery: The Late Paintings,” now at the
UCLA Hammer Museum.
By Dana Messore
Daily Bruin Contributor
[email protected]
Somewhere, lost in the vast abyss of modern art, lies the
abstract world of Milton Avery.Â
Considered by scholars and art historians to be one of greatest
contributors to 20th-century American art, Avery will be featured
in an exhibit titled “Milton Avery: The Late
Paintings,” at the UCLA Hammer Museum, which serves as the
exhibit’s only
West Coast venue.
“Part of the idea of the show was to show Avery in a
historical light and to see how he fit in with his own time,”
said Robert Hobbs during a phone interview, who has written books
on Avery and is the holder of the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair of
Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University. “The Hammer
takes a lot of cutting edge work, and for them to be taking Avery
is a surprise.”
The exhibition, featuring landscapes, seascapes, nudes and a
self-portrait, will focus on over 50 works Avery completed during
the last 20 years of his life, from the 1940s to the
’60s.
Heavily influenced by French painter Henri Matisse,
Avery’s work is characterized by abstract imagery pelted by
broad planes of brilliant color. He is known to express
himself unabashedly through his often radical color combinations
““ not only revealing the influence of French color-field
painters, but also his seeming comfortablity at boldly creating
technical combinations of unnatural colors.
“He uses wonderful arbitrary colors and uses them in such
a way that they feel very natural,” Hobbs said.
However, Avery’s talent has often been overlooked in the
sea of the abstract expressionism, minimalism, and pop art
movements that developed in the early to mid-20th century. His
choice to remain unaffiliated with any of the modern art schools
contributes to his neglect as an artist, but is also a credit to
his true independence.
“He parodies the abstract expressionists,” Hobbs
said, comparing Avery’s work to the Beatles’
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” satirical
romp. Hobbs explains that where artists like Mark Rothko, Adolf
Gottlieb and Jackson Pollock wanted to reveal some unseen
complexity behind their paintings, Avery’s work stood simply
for what it was: free from chaos and obscurity, just a
painting.
The artist never reached the career stardom many of his
contemporaries did, but that did not make Avery’s influence
any less substantial.
“He’s always been a revered painter among his
contemporaries,” said Russell Ferguson, the chief curator of
the UCLA Hammer Museum. “He’s a wonderful and very
important painter in the history of American art.”Â
Endeared as a “painter’s painter,” Avery
influenced other artists and was held in great esteem by those who
learned from him, most notably the abstract expressionist painter
Rothko, who delivered the eulogy at Avery’s funeral.
As much as the commercial art world has attempted to show that
Avery is not a forgotten painter and is just as important to
abstract expressionism as the Pollocks or Rothkos, according to
some art experts, the scholarly world seems to have skipped over
him.Â
“I think if you went into our slide collection, you would
find very few examples (of Avery’s work),” said Albert
Boime, UCLA professor of art history, specializing in modern
art.
“(Avery is) not very much studied here at UCLA,”
Boime added. “In that sense, our approach to Avery
probably fits in with the general neglect.”Â
According to Boime, Avery’s career decision to remain an
independent painter and to stay free from the confinement of a
particular art movement caused him to fall between the cracks in
scholarly study, stripping him of any possible celebrity status as
well as dropping him from the syllabus of art history survey
courses.
“People want to get to the stars in a … short 10-week
course dealing with 19th-century art, post-World War II. You want
to immediately deal with the celebrities,” Boime said.
His difficulty in finding a place in art history has spurred a
new interest in his work. For this very reason, the Hammer’s
exhibition hopes to shed light on the uncertainty of Avery’s
artistic position.
“Avery sort of straddles two worlds, a non-figurative and
a figurative,” Boime said.Â
“There’s a sense of harmony and calm that he
achieves that is important perhaps in this world of chaos and MTV
jolts,” Boime added. “Avery gives us a sense of
stillness and restfulness that are important.”
ART: “Milton Avery: The Late
Paintings” is featured at the UCLA Hammer Museum today
through Sept. 8. For more info, call (310) 443-7020.