The ‘Late,’ Semi-Great Modernist

Milton Avery is a Modern artist for people who don’t like Modern art. His formulaic work of the 1950s merges the earnest goodwill of American folk art with the picturesque color of School of Paris painting. The result is old-fashioned sentiment given a veneer of experimental adventure. It’s avant-garde lite.

At the UCLA Hammer Museum, “Milton Avery: The Late Paintings” flogs his 1950s work in a tortured effort to assert its illuminating relevance to the period. The show, organized and circulated by the American Federation of Arts, in fact demonstrates something else entirely.

It is a clear example of the way in which New York regionalism is still relentlessly projected as the authentic, meaningful centerpiece of contemporary American art history. Had Avery worked anywhere else in the United States in the 1950s--or had he stayed in Hartford, Conn., where he first took up painting in 1911--this exhibition would never have been organized, much less gone on tour. (Originally scheduled for museums in Milwaukee and West Palm Beach, Fla., it was added to the Hammer’s schedule at the last minute, when the UCLA museum’s renovation plan was delayed.)

Avery would be regarded today as a pleasant painter whose interest in color was important to his infinitely more talented friends, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, but who thrashed around for 50 years in futile search of his own significant style.

Instead, “Milton Avery: The Late Paintings” adopts a pretentious title--drumroll, please--even though virtually no one champions the tedious paintings of his first 40 years. Then “The Late Paintings” slices and dices an already narrow sliver of career into fine mince.

The show includes 50 paintings, the earliest dating from 1947. One, “White Nude #2,” was made in 1963, when poor health forced Avery to stop painting.

As with his prewar paintings of the American Scene, Avery continued to paint landscapes, still-lifes, women in interiors and other depictions of daily life in the 1950s. What drained away was the reportorial specificity of the earlier work. In its place, Avery made radically simplified forms. Large, often organic shapes lock together like pieces in a puzzle.

The shapes are built from layered, atmospheric color. Color was Avery’s strong suit--although he wasn’t especially inventive with it.

Matisse was his hero. Everything from the Frenchman’s odalisques to his stool-top still-lifes will be found in Avery’s compositions. “March on the Balcony” (1952), which shows a young woman seated at a seaside French window with a sailboat glimpsed in the distance, pays homage to Matisse’s famous (and far more riveting) “Open Window, Collioure” (1905).

The surprising chromatic juxtapositions of Pierre Bonnard, the jagged shapes in Georges Braque and even the primitive elongation in Amadeo Modigliani turn up in Avery’s paintings. The aggressive punch of his predecessors’ work, however, is typically tamped down.

Avery might wedge a khaki green shape between a sherbet orange and a teal blue one; more often he mixes his jangling colors with white, softening the tone and emphasizing a continuous surface. Harmony prevails.

His color tends to be gauzy and atmospheric, an effect achieved through layering and scraping. (He also always primed the canvas first.) Orange is thinned and brushed over blue-gray-green, or violet is brushed over blue.

Elsewhere a large field of pink over violet butts against a field of violet over pink, creating a lush but gentle reversal of space. In a still-life, an orange vase has been scratched with the stick end of the brush so that the golden yellow under-painting flickers through in jagged lines. These are the sorts of effects that Newman and especially Rothko admired in their older peer.

A folk-art quality also marks Avery’s paintings, partly deriving from his admiration for the small, romantic, tone-on-tone paintings of turn-of-the-century visionary artist Albert Pinkham Ryder. (Jackson Pollock was also a Ryder fan, and the distant sailboat in Avery’s “March on the Balcony” is lifted from Ryder’s signature marine painting in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) Avery’s simplified forms feel cobbled together with diligence and care. These are well-made pictures, crafted with Yankee pride.

The exhibition interprets these tranquil, homespun paintings as an expression of stability and calm that appealed to Americans weary of the fear and chaos brought on first by the Great Depression and then, convulsively, by World War II. Avery offered a balanced aesthetic vision--homeland security--appropriate to the social and political milieu of Cold War containment.

Perhaps--but I don’t think that reading goes nearly far enough.

For Avery’s art offers a specific kind of tranquillity, one earnestly American in character but still easily identified with School of Paris painting. It connects war-ravaged Paris, capital of the decimated avant-garde, with New York City, which was being promoted as the inheritor of Europe’s cultural legacy. Avery was a bridge--a Pont des Arts, if you will.

The promotion of New York regionalism as the national standard was well underway in the 1950s. We tend to think of regional art as having been made elsewhere in the United States--Thomas Hart Benton in Missouri, Grant Wood in Iowa or Stanton Macdonald Wright in Los Angeles. But the New York School was as regional as any other. Its endorsement as the nationwide benchmark continues apace, with Avery once again trotted out as a hearty (though refined) exemplar.

This process was bolstered four years after his death in 1965 (he was born in 1893) when Washington’s National Museum of American Art mounted a full-scale Avery retrospective. It met some critical resistance for including a full complement of his earliest work, from before World War I as well as paintings of everyday American life, which busied him until shortly after World War II.

That “misstep” was rectified in 1982, when New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a second retrospective. This one devoted two-thirds of its space to his work from the 1950s; the paintings of his first four decades provided a short introduction.

Now even that brief background has been jettisoned.

So I look forward to a future analysis (in 2020, perhaps?), when the focus can be narrowed even further. “Milton Avery: The Marine Paintings, circa 1958” could chronicle the fleeting eruption of a handful of paintings of the sea that chuck the safe harbor of peace and tranquillity. Courting mystery and visual contentiousness, a la Ryder, they exhibit what might be called true grit.

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UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, (310) 443-7020, through Sept. 8. Closed Monday.