La Cienega Area

A brilliant colorist who reworked seashore and countryside into lyrically abstracted images, Milton Avery was generally less successful when he dealt with the figure. In a group of works on paper, images of thunder-thighed, round-bellied nudes with angular faces from the ‘40s and ‘50s don’t make a good case for Avery’s insights into female form.

Some of the figurative works from the ‘30s have a more searching, idiosyncratic quality. “Bather,” an angular, clay-colored giant with a fall of black hair, is somewhat reminiscent of Picasso’s nudes of the ‘20s but with vivid snatches of landscape tucked around her anatomy. The high-shouldered, tight-knuckled child in a blue dress in “Little Girl”--probably a portrait of his daughter March--radiates a preternatural tension.

But it took a chunk of nature, with or without people, to throw Avery into high gear. It would be hard to top the watercolor “Spring Field” (1939) for sheer delirium, with its riot of watermelon green, faded red and yellow wedges shot through with scribbled, skittering black lines. In “Sea Watcher,” a massive fellow lying under a blanket ponders a calligraphic ruffle of foam edging the deep green and black sea.

The sole painting in the show, “Sketcher of Skulls” (1947), is unusual in Avery’s oeuvre. A Matissean richness of color drenches this interior scene in which an seated figure with a flat red face and curlicue hair sketches two bright yellow skulls on a blue table. Like radioactive deposits, the skulls irradiate the spare room with energy disproportionate to their small size. (Mekler Gallery, 651 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Sept. 2.)