The Checker Players

In The Checker Players Milton Avery presents his wife, artist Sally Michel (1902–2003), and friend and fellow artist Vincent Spagna (1897–1994) absorbed in playing checkers. The game board, tilted up in distorted perspective, rests between them in an interior reduced to a few pieces of furniture resembling cut-outs against a strong blue backdrop. The figures are equally distorted, exaggerated, and, with the exception of Spagna’s crudely modeled face, simplified in outline and shape; flesh is colored in bold, unnatural hues. The abstraction of the figures extends into the dry, brushy texture of Avery’s roughly applied paint, which further asserts the presence of the flat canvas surface. Nonetheless, The Checker Players conveys the individual figures’ respective attitudes of patient waiting and intense pondering with the artist’s characteristic dry humor and affection.

The Checker Players is one of numerous paintings of figures in domestic interiors that Avery made, often using family members and friends as models. He painted at least one other scene of Sally and Spagna playing checkers, Checker Players of 1943 (private collection). These informal interior images formed the basis of the artist’s production during the winter months in New York City; Avery rarely painted the city, devoting his landscapes to the rural places where he spent his summers with his family. The small apartment he shared with his wife and their daughter, March, who was born in 1932, was a gathering place for the Averys’ close-knit artistic circle, including Spagna, Avery’s acquaintance since his youth in Hartford, Connecticut. In The Checker Players, the casual arrangement of furniture, the unselfconscious absorption of the figures, and the deliberate naiveté of Avery’s representation evoke the informality of daily life for the Averys and their artistic friends. They formed what Avery’s friend and admirer, painter Mark Rothko (1903–1970), described as “a domestic, unhurried cast” from which the artist fashioned “a gripping lyricism.”

As Avery matured from academic realism to his highly personal mature style, he drew on the influences of European modernist artists whose work he encountered in New York City’s art galleries. Among the most important of these artists was the Frenchman Henri Matisse (1869–1954), leader of a group of painters known as the Fauves, or wild beasts, for their use of intense, expressive color, bold strokes, and exaggerated representation of nature. Avery’s paintings have been likened to those of Matisse for their simplified forms and flattened color areas, playfulness, and emphasis on abstract rhythm and balance. However, Avery applied these concepts to a highly personalized range of subjects, and used color for subtler, more refined effect. His paintings, characterized by the use of taut lines and angles and arbitrary color, evince a sense of structure and of wry wit that is entirely his own. The Checker Players demonstrates Avery’s peculiar melding of formal concerns with subject matter that is at once quotidian and deeply personal.

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D'une colonie à une collection: le Musée d'Art Américain Giverny fête ses dix ans (From a Colony to a Collection: Celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of the Musée d'Art Américain Giverny), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, March 30–June 16, 2002.

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Le Temps des loisirs : peintures américaines (At Leisure: American Paintings), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–October 31, 2008.

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