Evans is a place on Earth: Why Talk When You Can Paint?:Milton Avery @ the Royal Academy.

"Why talk when you can paint?" 'asked Milton Avery many years ago - and paint he most certainly did. Across the course of his career, and across the course of the Royal Academy's current show - Milton Avery:American Colourist, he moved from a decent if unremarkable impressionist painter of the American landscape to an early, and mostly unheralded, pioneer of abstract expressionism.

To me, the most interesting work he made was roughly half, or two thirds of the way, along that journey. Before he'd became almost wholly an abstract artist, though one who still claimed nature as his 'springboard', he experimented with colour, form, and perspective and there are times you can see him as a worthy successor to artists like Renoir and Van Gogh. He is, to my eyes, the closest American contemporary to titans of 20c art like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

Seated Girl with Dog (1944)

That's not how he's been remembered though - and it's now he started out. Born in New York state in 1885, his family settled in Connecticut and when Avery left school, aged sixteen, he started working in a local factory. A few years later, hoping to improve his earning potential, he enrolled in an evening class in 'commercial lettering' at the Connecticut League of Art Students.

It became a lifelong obsession and once he'd transferred to a drawing class, he continued studying art part time for the next fifteen years. The earliest painting in the exhibition comes from 1918 (when Avery turned 23) but it wasn't until the late twenties/early thirties, then living in New York and married to fellow art student Sally Michel, that he began to make a name for himself. He befriended the abstract expressionist artists Mark Rohtko and Adolph Gottlieb but he never aligned to that, or any other, movement.

Blossoming (1918)

Moody Landscape (1930)

Rolling Hills (c.1930s)

Fishing Village (1939)

Ox and Cart, Gaspe (1938-39)

In fact, his early work was more in debt to American Impressionist painters like John Henry Twachtman and Ernest Lawson. From them he learnt the importance of painting 'en plein air' (outdoors) in order to truly capture a place's essence. There are trees that could belong in a Van Gogh, idealised rural scenes that remind one of naive painters like Grandma Moses and Alfred Wallis, and there is, running through it all a celebration of the awesome spectacle of the American land.

From seas to hills, from trees to beaches, from farms to villages, it seems that Avery breathed it all in and then recreated with an unending passion. Even in these earlyish paintings you can see that Avery's use of colour is perhaps the boldest aspect of his work. While he is, at this point, still yet to find his true calling as an artist and is still in creative debt to others you can see the signs of a more daring painter emerging.

For me, that's illustrated best by 1938's Fox River Village. Painted from an unusually high vantage point so as to capture the swirl of the blue seas and the curve of the bay it's a simply gorgeous painting and was clearly a stepping stone in Avery's career as he widened his remit to take in both portraits and scenes of modern city life.

Fox River Village (1938)

Coney Island (1931)

Seaside (1931)

City (1928)

He was, after all, resident in America's largest metropolis - and with wife Sally he would take full advantage of New York's many galleries and museums. To me, 1928's City is the painting in which he best captures the almost gothic dynamism of the Big Apple. Railway tracks and skyscrapers jut out at all angles as buildings and life climb ever higher in to the sky. It feels hectic. It could hardly be a more different setting than Fox River Village and, because of that, Avery has painted it in a very different way but he's still painted it with love and fascination.

Those things always come through in Avery's work. He could be painting a rather prosaic looking auction or a potentially more exciting theatrical night out (In the Spotlight has more than a touch of the Renoir about it) and both subjects would command the same level of both attention and of respect from the artist. At the same time though, his paintings are never too 'heavy'. There's a lightness about them that brings joy. See, for example, 1942's Young Writer. There's a simplicity to it that shows Avery slowly breaking free from diktats of formalism and improvising on his own instincts.

The Auction (c.1930s)

In the Spotlight (c.1930s)

Young Writer (1942)

The confidence to be himself, while still being aware of and inspired by developments elsewhere in the art world, was clearly flowering but it had been for a while. 1933's Chariot Race is a large and energetic painting that is possibly one of the most atypical things he ever made. There is, to me, a touch of the James Ensor about its ferocious, and possibly deranged, carnival energy.

Compare and contrast with another painting of Fox river, 1942's Little Fox River, and a case could be made for Avery being something of a Jekyll and Hyde painter. Although accounts of his life suggest a quiet and pleasant man who lived happily with his wife and devoted most of his energies towards his art. The hidden darkness, it seemed, occasionally seeped out on to the canvas.

Chariot Race (1933)

Little Fox River (1942)

Though very rarely. As his name became more well known, Avery hosted a series of small group exhibitions in New York and, through Rothko, made friends with Barnett Newman. The Averys were popular hosts and would regularly invite fellow artists to their apartment where they would discuss their thoughts on art as well as reciting poetry and excerpts from books. Often Milton Avery would sit quietly in the corner sketching proceedings. It was this commitment, near obsession, with 'the work' that meant that Milton Avery would regularly complete one painting each day.

Still-life's that nod to Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical paintings, unusually lurid memento mori, bright red flowers in dark blue vases rubbed up against a fairly extensive selection of portraits. Portraits both of himself, his acquaintances, and even some of birds.

Still-life with Bottles (1942)

Still-life with Skull (1946)

Red Anemones (1942)

Oyster Catcher (1944)

Sooty Terns (1945)

1944's Oyster Catcher is reasonably traditional, even if the beak's a bit Cubist, but 1945's Sooty Terns look like something from the fevered mind of H.R.Giger or as if they're distant cousins of Jacob Epstein's Rock Drill. For an artist whose career seems to have taken, mostly, a clear path. Avery did throw out some very interesting curveballs.

When it came to painting people, Avery had form. He'd won his art school's portraiture prize in 1919 but twenty years later it's hard to imagine what the judge would think of his latest style of portrait painting where he took a Fauvist approach to colour, elongated bodies nearly as much as Modigliani or Giacometti, and sometimes dispensed with facial features completely. Why paint mouths, eyes, and noses when you can paint pure fields of colour? I like to imagine Avery responding to critics.

Self-Portrait (1941)

Dikran G. Kelekian (1943)

Husband and Wife (1945)

Twins (1935)

Two Figures at Desk (1944)

Friends (1961)

March in Brown (1954)

Despite leaving out, sometimes, all of the most obvious facial symbols of expression, Avery still manages to imbue his sitters with personality and feeling. The bored yet defensive poses of the husband and wife in Husband and Wife remind me of Walter Sickert's Ennui as if rendered by the brush of Andre Derain and the forlorn March in Brown looks lost in either thought, looking, or some deep personal grief.

It seems to me that this more adventurous approach to portraiture was what pushed Milton Avery on to what was to be the final chapter of his career. The fact that, in 1944, he had his first solo museum exhibition at the Phillips Memorial Art Gallery in Washington DC, must have been a confidence booster too. Not least as his work was exhibited alongside Picassos, Matisses, and Braques.

Hint of Autumn (1954)

Grazing Brahmins (1952)

Sails in Sunset Sea (1960)

Excursions on the Thames (1953)

The Seine (1953)

But it was no longer those European artists who were his co-travellers. Instead it was now the likes of Rothko, Newman and Richard Diebenkorn. Though Avery always maintained his paintings came from nature and that they were, at their core, both figurative and representative he pared down his use of colours so severely and he painted from such unusual angles or distances that his work started to, and would remain so until his death, have at least a veneer of abstraction.

Colour had once been used to celebrate nature but now colour had usurped nature. Perhaps colour had become nature. We can still recognise boats, bridges, and livestock in his paintings but they're starting to look a lot less realistic. Avery has realised some kind of intellectual muscle memory will do the heavy lifting on our parts and that frees him up to celebrate pure colour.

At the same time, it's interesting how his 1953 trip to Europe has resulted in two very different images of the rivers that flow through both Paris and London. While the Seine in Paris is pretty and almost pink, the Thames in London is dark and moody. Brooding. It's almost a knowing nod to Whistler's superb nocturnes painted eight decades previously.

The undaunted supremacy of colour in Avery's paintings became an ever more dominant feature in his twilight years. As he flattened his planes and reduced both human and landscaped forms he found a peace and tranquility in his work that befits a man who was by now in his seventies. Holidaying, sometimes with Rothko and Gottlieb, in Cape Cod, he began to use larger canvases but put less on them.

Clement Greenberg, one of the era's most prominent and respected American art critics, described this period of Avery's work as a "magnificent flowering" and though I wouldn't dispute that I think Avery had been cultivating artwork as beautiful as flowers for decades prior to this. The Royal Academy's exhibition, in just a few rooms, does a wonderful job of shining a light on an artist, who perhaps because he doesn't quite fit into an easy art historical narrative - or perhaps because he preferred to paint than talk, has rarely been given the praise he deserves. Consider this a corrective.