Artworks

Completed in 1956, Blue Gray Nude is derived from a much earlier pencil sketch, from 1936, and reveals radical distortion of form softened by the subtle harmonies of Avery’s palette. While such radical distortion and abstraction are frequently found in Avery’s drawings of the nude posing, in his oil paintings they are infrequently seen in quite the same degree as they are in Blue Gray Nude. It is interesting to note that the oil is based on a much earlier, 1936, pencil sketch, Prone Nude. And it was not unusual for Avery to mine his drawings in this way. The pose and palette seem to pay homage to Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude 1907, which had entered the collection of The Baltimore Museum of Art in 1950. Avery consistently sketched directly from the human figure throughout his career. Beginning in the 1930s, he, his wife Sally Michel, and a group of their New York artist-peers met informally in each others’ homes and studios to draw from the nude. Artists in the sketch group, over the years, included Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Byron Browne, John Graham, Lou Harris, Wallace Putnam, and George Constant. Avery sometimes drew and painted the sketch group itself – at work sketching a model. As Karl Willers has written, “Except for self-portraits and portrayals of artist-friends, almost all the figures in Avery’s art are women– real, individual, living women, seldom conforming to a preconceived ideal of feminine beauty. They are truthfully depicted with their bony or bulging physiques, their slumped or sprawling poses....However, Avery’s subjects do possess a certain dignity and significance that emerges not from their idealization, but from their unadorned and unaffected nature.” Karl Emil Willers (2011) p. 17