“Why talk when you can paint?” the reticent Milton Avery, grand colourist of modern American art, is reported to have once said. As an aphorism it seems to encapsulate the silent world of this prodigious artist whose method of communication was his canvas: it was not until 1952, at the age of 67, that Avery received his first full-scale retrospective museum exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, giving him a level of exposure he had not yet experienced, despite having been active for nearly 40 years. Acknowledging that Avery remains an influential painter for today’s generation of contemporary artists, this book published on the occasion of MICAS’s unprecedented survey is a rare European showcase, which features alongside work from a stellar cast of artists responding to Avery’s work, which include his daughter March Avery and others who have drawn on his work as inspiration for their use of colour – Henni Alftan, Harold Ancart, Andrew Cranston, Gary Hume, Jonas Wood and Nicolas Party.
