The Brooklyn Rail

Milton Avery was a quintessential American original whose work has nonetheless gained steady international recognition since his death in 1965. This recognition owes much to the independent spirit that painters worldwide have identified in his distinctive compositional structures and chromatic language. Avery’s independence, however, was hard won. One of his closest friends and protégés, Adolph Gottlieb, observed that for his own generation of artists, the freedom to develop a new and vital painterly idiom was inseparable from what he perceived as America’s general indifference to the cultural relevance of the artist. Writing in the 1947 issue of Tiger’s Eye, Gottlieb noted: “The dismal aspect of our separation from a social role is that we are not being used by our society … If we had a social role, we would be subservient to the society. The very fact that we are not being used and are isolated … is what gives us our freedom.”

Avery worked for years in relative obscurity early in his career, and perhaps with his own suspension of disbelief in societal approbation; yet, he ultimately forged a style so original that it came to assert its own self-evident truth. His earliest contacts with American pastoral painters such as John Henry Twachtman and Ernest Lawson helped him to identify a very deft and gentle kind of paint handling that would stay with him through his increasingly sophisticated assimilation of modernist tropes of composition and form. This finely tuned exhibition brings together exemplary works from Avery’s figural and landscape themes, while also presenting a perceptive grouping of international contemporary artists for whom Avery has proven an essential painterly forebear.

The locale of the exhibition, in the quite new and spectacularly conceived and sited Malta International Contemporary Art Space (MICAS), offers the viewer the opportunity to consider Avery in a very specific light. Carved in part from Malta’s native yellow limestone and incorporated into the island’s legendary military fortifications, the show is enveloped within a quasi-subterranean space that descends diagonally towards a view of one of the capital city of Valetta’s inner waterways. Presented on three levels are prime examples of Avery’s landscapes and figural groupings juxtaposed in interspersed dialogue, with works from the aforementioned international cohort of contemporary artists including Henni Alftan, Harold Ancart, March Avery, Andrew Cranston, Gary Hume, Nicolas Party, and Jonas Wood. The accompanying catalogue contains an insightful essay by the exhibition’s curator and MICAS Artistic Director Edith Devaney, as well as relevant individual responses to Avery’s work by the contemporary artist participants. Devaney’s curatorial strategy sharpens the encounter between revelation and recognition, introducing Avery’s work to new audiences while situating it within a growing international exchange.

Returning to the notion of Avery’s originality in painterly style and attitude, one could reference Robert Hobbs’s observation that, “Avery's method was the indirect process of thinking through the artistic codes for modernism, folk art, and American Impressionism and welding them into a new style that conveyed his reactions to the world.”¹ Avery, in other words, was a painterly bricoleur who managed to meld an impressive range of art historical influences into a bold and incisive style all his own. Such a combination of art historical discretion and impulsive license can be seen in Avery’s work Brown Sea (1958), where a seeming influence of the muted lyricism of Georges Braque’s late Varengeville-sur-Mer beachscapes is roughened by the brash physicality of Abstract Expressionist-like mark-making. The painting’s crescent-shaped waves, pressed into flattened arcs, don’t describe the sea so much as register its weight and drag, recalling Arthur Dove’s environmentally felt landscapes, where sensation precedes image. A large painting by the Belgian Harold Ancart, Sea View (2021), hung nearby, exploits a similar simplicity of form to impress upon the viewer a looming rocky gestalt framing a seascape’s dark and distant horizon. In a typical stylistic left-turn, Avery painted, within the same year, an almost completely abstract seascape entitled Blue Sea, Red Sky (1958). One of the larger-scaled canvases in the exhibition, it seems to acknowledge the bold contemporary simplicity of (another of his protégés) Mark Rothko’s signature horizontal swaths of color brushed in painted veils. The work exemplifies Avery’s willingness to playfully obscure the boundary between the figural and the abstract, which is one of his most appealing attributes. Unbound by categorical constraints, he could freely call up and deploy a range of formal approaches as diverse as the Post-Impressionist Nabi painters such as Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard and the Expressionism of Edvard Munch together with the most contemporary trends in abstract painting. In doing so, Avery tactfully unsettled Clement Greenberg’s formalist idée fixe of “the integrity of the picture plane.”

MICAS’s distinctive architecture is subtly echoed in Cécile Degos’s sensitive exhibition design, which deploys a sequence of curved walls that mirror both Avery’s own curvilinear forms and the grand arch of the space’s former incarnation as a seventeenth-century bastion’s escape route to the sea. And the curator’s decision to place Avery’s stark crucifixion scene, Yellow Christ (1945)—the closest he comes here to another significant European influence, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner—within the hollow of one of these curves imparted a strong evocation of a Romanesque church apse. The surrounding architecture amplifies its solemnity and presence. Since the entire space of MICAS is sheltered by a monumental, cantilevered shed-like roof, its overall impression of deep cultural excavation (not unlike the cavernous neolithic Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum site in nearby Paola) powerfully influences how work is displayed and seen within. Such an impression has the effect of lending an additional piquant historical gravitas to Avery’s characteristically buoyant compositions. The very tactile quality of the chiseled limestone walls of the space also offers an interesting physical counterpoint to Avery’s ostensibly capricious mark-making; its almost childishly naive “filling- in” and very physically present daubing, scumbling, and sgraffito. During a walkthrough with MICAS chairperson Phyllis Muscat, exhibition manager Guillaume Dreyfuss sportively offered the French idiom, “faire carrière”—literally “to make a career,” but also echoing carrière [quarry]—to suggest how both the space’s excavators and Avery himself practically “carved their way” toward compositional resolution. The Scottish painter Andrew Cranston comes closest in mirroring Avery’s tactile approach to paint and material application in his composition cryptically entitled, It’s Later Than You Think (2025). In the painting, Cranston depicts a rather quotidian view from a foreground composed of a quasi-abstract kitchen still life (reminiscent of the like in British painter William Scott’s oeuvre) toward a schematically depicted river on whose opposite bank a dour grouping of grey tower flats huddle. Beyond the domestic intimacy of Cranston’s subject, his collaged scraps of canvas reinforce the physicality of the painting’s stretched surface. In a very different register, yet equally surface-conscious, Gary Hume’s La Plage (2021) presents a gloss-painted aluminum plane, rendering a barely-there schematic violet sailboat against a deep red sky. Nearby, Avery’s Sails in Sunset Sea (1960) gives Hume’s quiescent vessel a run for his money: wildly abstract, gestural squiggles of “sea” seem to surge around two barely articulated shards of sail, threatening to engulf them entirely.

The exquisitely wrought and researched catalogue, edited by Devaney, contains some welcome contributions to the historical scholarship and contemporary public reception of Avery’s work. Of his willingness to draw from European influence, Devaney insightfully observes in her introductory essay:

Édouard Vuillard’s balancing enveloping sumptuousness with an almost airless claustrophobia, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s swirling distorted scenes of dramatic action, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s atmospheric landscapes were all works Avery saw and admired.

Additionally, in-depth interviews with the ensemble of contemporary artists included in the exhibition offer personal insights into why Avery (a painter’s painter) remains such a strong example of artistic freedom. Gary Hume, for instance, pinpoints Avery’s perennial appeal, stating “It looks like everyone who discovers him feels like they have just discovered him,” while Henni Alftan offers, “I don’t know if it’s the timeliness of his work, its contemporaneity, the boldness or the complexity of colors. There’s so much there to go by, it’s infinite.” And Avery’s daughter, March, who is present in the exhibition with four canvases of her own, appears in a revealing extended interview with chair of MICAS International Committee Waqas Wajahat, recounting not only her father’s daily routines, but also his straightforward, unpretentious approach to painting and the art world he inhabited, offering glimpses of a life lived with quiet intensity.

The introduction of Avery’s work to an international audience is proving increasingly influential. Devaney’s 2022 exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, together with the current show, has fostered a growing international enthusiasm, largely due to the accessibility of Avery’s painterly language: joyfully simple subjects and forms organized into intricate, puzzle-like compositions and animated by a distinctive use of color. By pairing Avery with like-minded contemporary artists, Devaney underscores the capacity of this appeal to operate within a broader, renewed critical discourse. In this regard, MICAS’s location in Malta, a polycultural crossroads for centuries, appears especially well-suited to supporting such an exchange.