Artworks

We always used to go to sketch class once a week for years as long as I can remember… And for a while actually, when March was little, we used to have the sketch class in our own house once a week… We were always sketching. Nudes, landscapes, figures. Everybody that came to the house was a model… Because when we sat around at night we just didn’t sit around and talk. We always sat around and sketched. It was a real life with a viewpoint. The viewpoint was painting. – Sally Michel Avery interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler, Archives of American Art, November 3, 1967. The composition of Grey Nude likely developed from one of these sketch class drawings, described by Sally Avery in 1967. Avery’s friend, the artist Adolph Gottlieb, once recalled, “Avery was a wonderful draughtsman. His figures were more literal than they would appear later in the painting which developed out of the sketches. It was realism of a sort, with distortion accentuating what was characteristic in the model or giving play to the humor that was characteristic of Avery. Heads grew small; figures were elongated, thighs swelled.”– Adolph Gottlieb quoted in Frederick S. Wight (1952) p. 13 In her catalogue essay, Edith Devaney has pointed out, “Grey Nude, 1943-44, with its stone colouring devoid of any sense of living skin, and unnatural proportions, owes much to Matisse’s paintings of monumental nudes, and indeed to his sculptural figures.” [Edith Devaney p. 13] While in a 1967 interview, Sally Avery said that there was a vast, even erroneous, overemphasis on Avery’s kinship with Matisse, and Avery himself is quoted as saying “Some critics like to pin Matisse on me…but I don’t think he has influenced my work” [Avery quoted in Frank Crotty (1961)], there is no reason to deny the possibility of a dialogue here, perhaps with Matisse’s Standing Nude of 1907, and his series of bronzes, The Back I-IV, 1909-1930. In 1931, the same year as Matisse’s Museum of Modern Art retrospective, Brummer Gallery in New York had presented an exhibition of the artist’s sculpture, which included forty-six works. And in 1943, the year Avery began Grey Nude, Kurt Valentin’s Buchholz Gallery held an exhibition of bronzes by Degas, Matisse and Renoir, which included twelve works by Matisse. In Avery’s painting, the figure, juxtaposed with an eloquent, minimal still life, is itself treated as still life. As well, as one critic observed in 1961, “One aspect of Avery's concept of space calls for mention. This is the visual pull-and-tug engendered by his habit of coordinating a form of exaggerated perspective in his figures (a device which creates a feeling of great dignity in his case, rather than the opposite) within enclosing areas of extreme flatness.” George N. Morris (1961)