MILTON AVERY 1885-1964
The Baby, 1944
Oil on canvas, 44 X 32" (111. 76 X 81.28 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Milton Lowenthal, 955-0-105

Considered the "American Matisse" by many critics, Milton Avery was never a slavish follower of the French master's work. Avery's The Baby subtly transforms Henri Matisse's style into a distinctly American one through gentle parody and quiet understatement. Here, Avery plays with the aspects of both the Fauvist and Nice period Matisse by transforming his seductive abstract nudes into an infant wearing a pink ruffled dress, who kicks up one leg in a frolicsome fashion. In place of the exotic appurtenances of a harem found in many Matisse paintings, Avery places the child in an ebonized Charles Eastlake style Victorian lady's chair, similar to a piece in the Avery's household. Instead of using Matisse's highly saturated colors, teamed in often startling combinations, Avery chose lambent areas of golden tones to create an embracing background for the complementaries of orange and blue making up the blanket and child. The slightly sprawling and embracing chair in which the head of the baby comfortably nestles serves as a surrogate grandmother. This piece of furniture establishes a sense of continuity, and the baby a sense of hope for the future. These feelings were particularly pertinent in 1944, since the Allied invasion of Europe had led to an escalation of the war effort and the hope that World War II would soon be over.
In 1944 Avery's work began to achieve some critica success. In January, his first solo museum exhibition opened at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D.C. In the following year an exhibition of his paintings opened in the Rosenberg and Durand-Ruel galleries in New York City, closing shortly before his sixtieth birthday. For Avery, a late-
comer to the art world, this dual showing represented an important opportunity to reinforce the direction he had chosen, and he consequently created some of his most important works during that year. These shows also provided an occasion to respond to the 1943 letter to The New York Times written by his two close friends, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, who indirectly condemned his type of art. Even though they preferred "the simple expression of the complex thought ... [and] the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal," they were convinced that "only that subject-matter is valid which is tragic and timeless." At the time that this letter was published Avery and his family were summering in Gloucester, Massachusetts where they saw the Gottliebs and Rothkos on a daily basis. Known for his wit and taciturnity, Avery probably did not remark on the implicit criticism of his art that his friends' letter represented. In characteristic fashion, he let painting be his mouthpiece, and The Baby, together with such remarkable works of the same year as Seated Girl with Dog (1944, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Roy B. Neuberger, New York) and Mother and Child (1944, private collection), responded to his friends' quest for a mythic and timeless art by asserting the equally meaningful significance of daily life. The success of Avery's undertaking can be ascertained in the ways that he has taken both the anonymity and abstraction of modern life and made them both as fresh and familiar as an infant cavorting in a favored heirloom Victorian lady's chair.

ROBERT HOBBS