Artist and Nude, 1940

Artist and Nude combines Milton Avery’s interest in the human figure and his use of flat expanses of color. In this painting, he represented himself at work. Avery, his back to the viewer, sketches a nude model who stands on a bed, her figure framed by an open window. She holds at her side an indistinct object that could be a robe or blanket, its rose color matching that of the windowsill. In keeping with his reductive aesthetic, Avery refined the composition into areas of two-dimensional form and bold color. Within these sections, the painter added subtle details. Red swirling brushstrokes decorate the back wall, the playful lines only slightly darker in color than the wall itself. For the wood grain of the floorboards, the artist’s hair, and the window shutters, Avery incised lines with the wooden end of his brush, a technique called sgraffito. The painting’s bright palette, seen in details such as the vivid pink of the artist’s face, fulfills an expressive rather than solely naturalistic function. Avery would continue in this direction as the decade progressed. Curator Barbara Haskell, who organized a 1982 retrospective of Avery’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, observed that around 1940 Avery’s colors “became much bolder as he created the mood of a situation by discarding the constraints of naturalistic hues and favoring a saturated, non-naturalistic palette."[1]  [1]
Barbara Haskell, Milton Avery (New York, 1982), 72.

The painting’s subject, colors, decorative patterning, and prominently placed open window are all reminiscent of Henri Matisse (French, 1869 - 1954). The visual links between Matisse and Avery were most apparent during the late 1930s and early 1940s, the years when Avery exhibited at the Valentine Gallery, owned by Matisse’s American dealer, Valentine Dudensing. Early in 1940, Henry McBride became the first major critic to notice the similarity between the artists’ works. Avery, however, denied that Matisse had influenced him.[2]  [2]
Henry McBride, “Hartley and Avery: Two American Artists Who Paint for Painters,” New York Sun, Feb. 24, 1940. For a discussion on the somewhat contentious issue of Matisse’s influence on Avery, see Karl Emil Willers, Milton Avery & the End of Modernism (New Paltz, NY, 2011), http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/9aa/9aa483.htm. Sally Michel (American, 1902 - 2003), the artist’s wife and an accomplished artist in her own right, found dissonance between the two artists’ treatments of the nude figure: “Matisse was a hedonist and Milton was an ascetic. . . . That is the opposite of French sensibility. . . . Milton’s nudes are the purest nudes you ever came across, where, you know, Matisse’s have an erotic quality. Milton never gets anything erotic in his work.”[3]  [3]
“The Reminiscences of Sally Avery: Interviews with Louis Schaeffer” (unpublished manuscript, Oral Research Office, Columbia University, 1980), 23, partially quoted in Robert Carleton Hobbs, Milton Avery: The Late Paintings (New York, 2001), 54.

While the woman in Artist and Nude assumes a less openly available posture than that of Matisse’s odalisques (see Odalisque Seated with Arms Raised, Green Striped Chair or Odalisque, Half-Length--The Tattoo [both 1923]), the painting is not stripped of all sexual connotation. The power dynamic inherent in an artist-model relationship is made physically evident in this work. The artist’s hulking form, fully clothed in a suit, appears capable of overpowering the model, whose garment or blanket seems too small to fully cover her body and who is already situated on a bed. Nonetheless, the model’s position—standing centered against the flat, bright blue of the view through the window—and her elongated proportions lend her solidity and make her the focal point of this work.

Robert Torchia

July 24, 2024