Milton Avery: American Colourist – visitors will leave ‘with a new star in their firmament’
Royal Academy show brings together 67 works from Avery’s large and varied oeuvre

Milton Avery was “a colossus of 20th century painting”, said Cal Revely-Calder in The Daily Telegraph. While his name might not be familiar to many Europeans, he was a seminal figure in American art.
Avery (1885-1965) began his half-century-long career as an impressionist and ended it as an abstract expressionist. In a country which had yet to stake its place in art history, he was a trailblazer. His “flexible brilliance” was suited to any number of styles; his admirers included Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, and though he never quite threw himself into pure abstraction, his influence on both was profound.
Now, for the first time in this country, his work is being celebrated in a full-scale retrospective, at the Royal Academy. It brings together 67 works from Avery’s large and varied oeuvre, including landscapes, seascapes, portraits (human and animal) and abstract canvases. There are echoes of various European and American masters – Matisse, Van Gogh, Derain, Rothko – as we follow his fascinating but “elusive” career. Visitors will leave this show “with a new star in their firmament”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Avery was born to a working-class family from Hartford, Connecticut, said Laura Freeman in The Times. He started off painting “pleasant, passable landscapes, more or less after Monet”. Then, courtesy of “New York and a new vision”, came “the jump”: witness the shift from the “polite” Setting Sun (1918) to the altogether more “robust” Moody Landscape (1930), a picture swimming in “bruised and wine-stained hues”.
The 1930s was the decade in which Avery came “into his own”. Works such as Fishing Village (1939) are brought to life through energetic, scratchy brush strokes. Later, as he moved towards abstraction, Avery showed that he had the knack of “colour-blocking”: “blood orange against turquoise; Colman’s mustard against coal black”. He may not have been, ultimately, a “first-class artist” – he was more of a “middleman”, a guide hacking a “way through the vines”. But even so, you will leave the exhibition “wide-eyed and dazzled”.
Avery was sometimes referred to as “an American Matisse”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. In fact, “he is much stranger, and better than that”. Far from merely emulating European artists, Avery was a bona fide modern master who developed a visual language of his own. Little Fox River (1942), for instance, seems like a “joyous and summery” vision of a “butter-yellow landscape surrounded by blue waves” at first glance, but is infinitely more fascinating on close examination. The waves are “big and inhuman”, their swell making the buildings on the shore look “frail”.
More interesting still is Man With a Pipe (1935), a “deliberately bizarre scene” depicting “a blackish sky over a grey ocean over a yellow beach”. Remove the people from the composition and you have “exactly the same kind of sublime vertical stack of colours Rothko painted”. Avery’s genius was his ability “to find abstraction hidden inside nature itself”. America’s open landscapes are more suited to abstraction than Europe’s fields and hills: even his figurative works show “eerie empty vistas of sea and sky”.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
This is an exhibition that gives us “a new vista on American art itself”, and a superb opportunity to acquaint ourselves with an “idiosyncratic, experimental American dreamer”.
Royal Academy, London W1 (royalacademy.org.uk). Until 16 October
-
September 1 editorial cartoons
Cartoons Monday’s political cartoons include Labor Day picnic, branding strategy, and more
-
What is Tony Blair's plan for Gaza?
Today's Big Question Former PM has reportedly been putting together a post-war strategy 'for the past several months'
-
When does autumn begin?
The Explainer The UK is experiencing a 'false autumn', as climate change shifts seasonal weather patterns
-
Woof! Britain's love affair with dogs
The Explainer The UK's canine population is booming. What does that mean for man's best friend?
-
Millet: Life on the Land – an 'absorbing' exhibition
The Week Recommends Free exhibition at the National Gallery showcases the French artist's moving paintings of rural life
-
Thomasina Miers picks her favourite books
The Week Recommends The food writer shares works by Arundhati Roy, Claire Keegan and Charles Dickens
-
6 laid-back homes for surfers
Feature Featuring a home near a world-renowned surf spot in Hawaii and a house built to withstand the elements in South Carolina
-
Twelfth Night or What You Will: a 'riotous' late-summer jamboree
The Week Recommends Robin Belfield's 'carnivalesque' new staging at Shakespeare's Globe is 'joyfully tongue-in-cheek'
-
Hostage: Netflix's 'fun, fast and brash potboiler'
The Week Recommends Suranne Jones is 'relentlessly defiant' as prime minister Abigail Dalton
-
Music reviews: Chance the Rapper, Cass McCombs, and Molly Tuttle
Feature "Star Line," "Interior Live Oak," and "So Long Little Miss Sunshine"
-
Film reviews: Eden and Honey Don't!
Feature Seekers of a new utopia spiral into savagery and a queer private eye prowls a high-desert town