Overview

Milton Avery, the poet of colour, in the catalogue of the MICAS exhibition “Why talk when you can paint?” the reticent Milton Avery, grand colourist of modern American art, is reported to have once said. As an aphorism it seems to encapsulate the silent world of this prodigious artist whose method of communication was his canvas: it was not until 1952, at the age of 67, that Avery received his first full-scale retrospective museum exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, giving him a level of exposure he had not yet experienced, despite having been active for nearly 40 years. And yet, this ‘artist’s artist’ was revered by those who saw in him a master of colour, as his works graduated from early Impressionist landscapes, to the flattened forms of colour that critics say paved the way for the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s. Summers spent in Provincetown in with Rothko and Gottlieb saw Avery turn the cerulean combination of water and beaches into broad fields of colour that magically converged in simplified representations of colours, “leaving nothing but colour and pattern.” Rothko would assert that Avery was America’s greatest painter – “his is the poetry of sheer loveliness”. Acknowledging that Avery remains an influential painter for today’s generation of contemporary artists, this book is a rare European showcase, which features alongside work from a stellar cast of artists responding to Avery’s work, which include his daughter March Avery and others who have drawn on his work as inspiration for their use of colour Henni Alftan, Harold Ancart, Andrew Cranston, Gary Hume, Jonas Wood, Nicolas Party.

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Edith Devaney is the artistic director at MICAS. For twenty years she was a senior curator at the Royal Academy of Arts where she was responsible for originating and curating exhibitions such as Jasper Johns; ‘Something Resembling Truth’ exhibition in 2017 and Abstract Expressionism in 2016. She also curated the David Hockney exhibition, 82 Portraits and one still-life, and originated and co-curated the Hockney landscape exhibition, A Bigger Picture, in 2012, and Richard Diebenkorn in 2015. In her capacity as Head of Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, she worked with many international contemporary artists on both the curation of this annual exhibition and special projects and displays relating to it.

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