A MODERN MAN
cross the gallery sits a faceless couple. Flattened to their most idiomatic outlines, they converse in shallow planes of imaginative color—Crimson Coral, Stuart Gold, Cornflower Blue. The canvas in question evades a set style. While its brushstrokes reflect a refined European syntax, the work simultaneously exudes an uncanny American domesticity. The precise tradition his works embody, a 1945 work by Milton Avery (1885–1965), one of some 70 works of his on display in a touring exhibition now on view at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum (through June 5) and later at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (July 15–October 16).
