The Quiet Man

Milton Avery (1885–1965) was a man of few words. He would go whole days without saying anything, until his wife, the painter Sally Michel Avery, would finally get him to speak. The couple liked to entertain fellow artists in their New York apartment, and during these gatherings, Avery would sit silent until finally letting drop a remark that showed he’d been paying close and thoughtful attention all along. By way of explanation for his quietness, he said, “Why talk when you can paint?”

And his paintings are eloquent indeed. Avery developed a visual language all his own, in which passages of color, rather than perspective, convey the sense of space and depth. His paintings, while always figurative, became increasingly abstract over the course of his career as he radically simplified his forms and reduced line work to a minimum. In Avery’s late work, generally accepted as his greatest, it seems as if various colored shapes happen to coalesce gracefully to form a picture. In keeping with the artist’s quiet nature, his paintings are contemplative and poetic rather than dramatic or intense, and yet they have a quality that Avery, in