Wild waves, perfect pipes: Milton Avery, inventor of abstract America – review

Royal Academy, London
As this brilliant exhibition shows, Avery was an experimental dreamer whose sublime landscapes and beach scenes paved the way for Rothko, Pollock and Newman

It doesn’t take long to start seeing the Rothkos hidden in Milton Avery’s beach scenes and landscapes. They loom as eerie empty vistas of sea and sky, turning what seem to be figurative compositions into abstract masterpieces. Man With a Pipe, for instance, is a deliberately bizarre scene painted in 1935. But remove the people and you would have three layers of abstract colour: a blackish sky over a grey ocean over a yellow beach. Exactly the kind of sublime vertical stack of colours Rothko painted.

The resemblance is not accidental. Mark Rothko first met Avery in late-1920s New York and hugely admired the older man: Avery was born in 1885, Rothko in 1903. Rothko’s generation would shake modern art and make New York the art capital of the world, painting huge canvases with no apparent subject matter, just colour, yet whose intense expressiveness got them named the abstract expressionists. Avery never made the same leap as Rothko, Barnett Newman or Jackson Pollock into pure abstraction but this brilliant exhibition proves he didn’t need to. This idiosyncratic, experimental American dreamer was already anticipating their poetic use of colour years earlier, in canvases that find abstraction hidden inside nature itself.

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