Milton Avery at the RA

By 1926 Avery was living in New York and working full-time as an artist. Avery took advantage of the access to art offered by the city, and he and his wife, Sally, spent every Saturday visiting galleries and museums. In 1929 the Museum of Modern Art opened, allowing Avery's interest in European Modernism to grow as he saw more examples of the movement's works.

In addition to using the sketches he had executed throughout the summer months, Avery also turned to the city for inspiration for his paintings, in particular to its human activity and crowds. Both of the beach scenes shown here Seaside and Coney Island (1931), are experimental in differing ways.

The former reduces the representational elements, flattening and abstracting them into areas of colour, while the latter concentrates on placing figures in space and simplifying the planes of pigment. In both works, Avery treats the subjects with the same lightness of touch and underlying humour that is characteristic of much of his work.

Chariot Race (1933) contains all the energy of the circus, with both the subject and composition owing much to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whose work Avery would have seen in New York. Avery was not to produce another painting of this scale until much later in his career.

Once settled into life in New York, the Averys quickly became part of the city's artistic community.

Attending evening drawing classes at the Art Students League for twelve years, Avery widened his group of artist friends and by 1928 he was participating in small group exhibitions. Some of these included the younger artist Mark Rothko, who became a close friend and later introduced Avery to Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman.

The Averys became known as welcoming hosts, regularly inviting artists to their modest apartment to spend the evening discussing art and sometimes reading poetry and books aloud. Rothko and Gottlieb were daily visitors, always eager to see Avery's most recent work.

Avery was known as a man of few words and an observer rather than a participant. It was not unusual for him to sketch quietly during such gatherings - the people, the room and its objects

- and to include the motifs later in paintings.

Famously prolific, Avery would regularly complete a painting every day, and his work ethic, as well as his compositions and subjects, was an inspiration to his younger artistic friends.

Avery's skill in portraiture was first recognised during his training in Hartford, when in 1919 he won his art school's portraiture prize. In a parallel development to his landscapes and still-lifes, the style of Avery's portraiture shifted from conventional studies to a more stylised approach. The composition of The Artist and his Wife (1928-29) is innovative in its long, thin format and in the positioning of the figures in relation to each other. The artist treats his own face differently to that of his wife, which is executed with a greater economy. The depiction of their daughter, in March in Babushka (1944), signalled a new approach to colour and form.

Both March and Sally were frequently the subject of his paintings. Avery stripped out any sense of sentiment from images of his family, approaching their depiction as he would that of any other sitter.

The artist had ceased formal portraiture by around 1939, with the exception of self-portraits - the example here dating from 1941 being one of the finest - although the human figure remained a key subject for him.

In 1944, Milton Avery's career took a significant step forward. He had his first one-man museum exhibition at the Phillips Memorial Art Gallery in Washington DC and joined the prestigious gallery of Paul Rosenberg & Co, which represented many European modernist painters, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

The year also marked a significant breakthrough in Avery's work. His keen interest in colour, already evident from the 1930s, evolved further. He began thinning his pigments and layering them on the canvas, painting planes of colour in closely related tones or hues. This, along with a simplification of form, replaced traditional perspective in his work with a more subtle intimation of depth and atmosphere, both of which he evoked with colour.

As first seen in the 1944 paintings and exemplified by Seated Girl with Dog, this tendency continued and intensified in his work throughout the 1940s and then into the 1950s, when the colours softened and his use of non-associative (or unnatural) colours became less apparent.

This breakthrough established Avery as a leading

American colourist, significantly influencing the next generation of American painters who now understood the possibility of employing colour to create a sense of the sublime.

In his later career, Avery continued to develop his use of colour and form to create works of great harmony. His output at this time was dominated by landscape subjects, many of them including small figures. In reducing both the human form and the landscape to simplified and flattened planes of interlocking colour, Avery achieved a balance between the two. This was a hallmark of his later works and is seen in paintings such as Two Figures (1960).

The final section of the exhibition focuses on work executed from 1957 in Cape Cod, where Avery spent four consecutive summers, often in the company of Rothko and Gottlieb. These later works, with their larger scale and more abstracted forms, reveal the influence of the younger painters. Intensifying what he had striven towards over the previous five decades, Avery omitted detail, distorted forms and used non-associative colours. However, as he learnt from the American Impressionists, he never invented what his eye did not witness.

One of the key American art critics of the time, Clement Greenberg, described these late paintings as a 'magnificent flowering. Although Avery was moving closer to the borderline between representation and abstraction in these works, they continued to fulfil his lifelong quest to capture, as he put it himself, "the essence of nature'.