As cool and refreshing as a selection of sorbets: RA’s Milton Avery show reviewed

‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much as he was prepared to say. Contemporary critics tried to ‘pin Matisse’ on him as if art criticism were a branch of police work. He resisted, and remains a slippery customer. Post-impressionist or abstract expressionist? Colour field painter with added figures? To those who view art history as the march of progress towards modernism, he looks like a backslider. Clement Greenberg thought as much, dismissing him in 1943 as ‘a “light” modern who can produce offspring of Marie Laurencin and Matisse that are empty and sweet with nice flat areas of colour…’ Ouch.

‘Light’ is a fair description of Avery’s work: light in tonality, in weight of paint and intellectual baggage. Not a product of the art school system, he assimilated rather than learned his trade. A working-class descendant of English immigrants, he worked in Connecticut factories from the age of 16 and fell into art almost by accident. The commercial lettering night class he had joined to improve his prospects was cancelled and he was transferred to life drawing by a sharp-eyed tutor. In some ways he remained a perpetual student, supported by his commercial illustrator wife after his move to New York aged 40 in 1925; he was 50 when her faith in him was rewarded with representation by a New York dealer. He kept up a factory rate of production regardless, sometimes finishing a canvas in a single day. He never knew the meaning of artist’s block, perhaps because he didn’t invent: however far removed from conventional representation his work appeared, it was rooted in reality. He painted from life.

The early Connecticut landscapes in the Royal Academy’s exhibition – the first European survey of Avery’s work – are impressionist paintings in the plein-air tradition dappled with colour.