"Milton Avery: Edge of Abstraction" at Knoedler & Company.

"Milton Avery: Edge of Abstraction" at Knoedler & Company, New York. November 10, 1999-January 22, 2000

"Ripeness is all," Shakespeare reminds us, invoking both age and timeliness. "Milton Avery: Edge of Abstraction" an outstanding show of fifteen of the artist's late works at Knoedler, records the timely encounter of a mature sensibility with the comparatively youthful experiments of the New York School. Avery (1885-1965) was already in his seventies when he began pushing his heretofore representational paintings toward abstraction, giving the lie to the notion that innovation visits only the young. He was born to the first modernist generation (in the same year as Ezra Pound) and was influenced by Cezanne and Matisse. Neither an ideologue nor a joiner of schools, he avoided many of the fashionable artistic movements of his time. Despite his commitment to representational painting, in the Thirties he shunned politically inflected styles such as American Scene painting and Social Realism. Avery's idiosyncratic path led him instead to influence and be influenced by a later generation of modernists, the Abstract Expressionists. He formed relationships with Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb long before they found success as artists.

To Avery, abstraction meant abstracting from nature, paring it down; he eschewed purely non-objective painting. Still, several of the works in this show might easily be taken for complete abstractions were it not for their tides. For instance, without its title Boathouse by the Sea (1959) could be seen as a study in color fields--an orange bar at the top of the canvas, a light blue rectangle below it, then an oblique triangle of yellow and, below that, a black field. But, given the rifle, the uppermost areas of color resolve into sky, water, and sand. Studied more closely, the black field at the bottom appears to have two shades, suggesting the eponymous boathouse and its shadow. Blue Sea, Red Sky (1958), the painting in this exhibit closest to the "edge of abstraction" invariably recalls Rothko's horizontal bands of color. Again, a red-orange bar stands in for the sky, a blue bar for the sea, and yellow for the sand. Yet Avery didn't use under-painting nearly as much as his friend Rothko. His bands of color don't float within larger fields; they are flatter and have less depth than Rothko's aqueous planes. In all the works in this show, Avery applied thin layers of pigment, leaving the grain of the canvas visible. He used a relatively muted palette that perfectly evokes the diffuse coastal light Avery loved to depict.

By simplifying natural landscapes to color and form, Avery helped continue a tradition--running from Cezanne through notables like Richard Diebenkorn--of exploring the abstract limits of representational painting. While the catalogue essay mentions the "elimination of subject matter," most of the works here do have recognizable content. Avery wanted to reduce or boil down the complexities of the natural world, not eliminate them entirely. In both Sandspit with Gulls (1958) and Sandbar & Sea (1958), white images of birds define and contextualize the more abstract forms. The starkly gorgeous Sunlight Reflections (1957) employs the barest marks--black squiggles for waves among daubs of blue, with white and yellow dapples running vertically down the center of the canvas--to describe sunlight reflecting on the sea. That process of reduction can be discerned in Alex Katz's recent large-scale waterscapes and images of trees, which dearly show that Katz was influenced by Avery. In addition to the paintings, Knoedler includes a number of studies in oil, crayon, gouache, watercolor, and flat black on paper, which hew closely to the techniques and imagery of the paintings.

These are splendid works, the ripe fruit of a life spent painting, and made sweet by the freshness Avery brought to the endeavor even in his later years.

Daniel Kunitz is the managing editor of The Paris Review.