The thrill of Katz ends around 1980, so there’s lots of been there, done that.
The Guggenheim’s retrospective of the career of Alex Katz opened in late October, and I’m certain it’ll please people. Alex Katz: Gathering covers eight decades — at 95, he’s still working — and certainly pleased me, inasmuch as I think he’s an uneven artist who hasn’t had a new idea since Duran Duran was hot. Still, I’d recommend it. It looks fantastic at the Guggenheim and suits its spiral rotunda galleries. The labels are lucid and thorough. His collages, cutouts, paintings from the ’60s, woodcuts, and, here and there, paintings from the ’70s are exquisite. His later work? Bigger ain’t better. Being as long and wide as a city block does not a blockbuster painting make.
Katz has had a few retrospectives and, by the artist’s count, 320 solo exhibitions since 1954. There’s nothing new to say about him. The catalogue says nothing new but does so beautifully. I don’t begrudge a 95-year-old a splash, though, and Gathering’s raison d’être is easy to spot. Paid visitorship at the Guggenheim, as at almost every museum in the country, has stalled at about two-thirds of its numbers from 2019, the last full year before the Covid mass hysteria and lockdowns. Katz, they hope, will break the logjam and bring people back to the museum.
Katz is a survivor, as is Jasper Johns, who’s 90, both acclaimed in the late ’50s and early ’60s as front edge and red hot. Johns is more elusive and, Southern-born, an outsider, but Katz, New York–born and bred, was a vital part of the ’60s aesthetic firmament he shared with Frank O’Hara, Rudy Burckhardt, Edwin Denby, Irving Sandler, and Paul Taylor.
Katz’s Cocktail Party, from 1965, is his most famous painting. It depicts guests at a soirée at Katz’s New York apartment. It’s a cool, hip, smart group, bohemian but not chaotic or addled. Clinking glasses and dangling cigarettes are as close to instability as we get. Unlike the flotsam and jetsam at Andy Warhol’s Factory, these people made good art, wrote well, paid the rent, and got the kids to school. The picture’s one of the stars of Gathering, and there are many others.
Most of Katz’s work is decorative. His palette is bold, bright, and inventive. He’s said many times that he’s inspired by the American billboard aesthetic. I’d class much of his painting since, say, 1980 as not only decorative but décor. He’s a brand, easy to recognize and easy on the eyes. Angst, woe, subjugation, and other dark nights of the soul don’t figure. Katz’s art works for those who find phlegm and distance seductive.
Round Hill, from 1977, is peak Katz sangfroid, with a spark. In figure painting, he’s at his best when the two meet, and they never collide. Five young people, two men and three women, are on a beach. They’re reclining but either sitting up or with heads and torsos propped and silent. One of the women reads Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s play, which is a love story between the title characters and also a Trojan War story, mostly between Achilles and Hector. The painting is hot meets cold, and cold wins, maybe.
That “maybe” is Katz with flair. The man in the foreground, back toward us, seems to exchange looks with a woman in the background. Their legs match. She’s svelte. His stringy hair and big glasses define him as a geek. Unlike another man, pecs aplenty, a porn-star mustache, lounging in the background, the geek is wearing a shirt. We’re challenged to supply a storyline. Adding Troilus and Cressida is ego-tripping or ironic or a helpful hint or self-aggrandizing or a bit of each.
Katz’s durability owes much to branding but also to the advent of the deluxe New York and Los Angeles loft and the boom in museum architecture. Lots of wall space to fill, and Katz serves wide, open canvases for wide, open spaces. These phenomena begin in the ’80s. Katz serves these new markets well.
So much for swipes, for now. Katz grew up in Queens, the son of bourgeois Russian émigrés who fled when the Bolsheviks seized power. He studied art as a young man at Cooper Union and then at the Skowhegan School in Maine. He learned at Skowhegan how to paint outdoors and how to approach painting light. By the mid ’50s, he was spending summers in Lincolnville, Maine, a tiny, rural town not far from Skowhegan. He still lives there every summer, making him both a New York artist and a Maine artist.
“When I was in art school, everyone was interested in Primitivism, Freud, and Marx,” Katz wrote in his autobiography. “I was interested in jazz and dancing.” His work doesn’t feature jazz or dancing but, in the ’50s, he was countercultural. He was a figure painter in an art world devoted to Abstract Expressionism. Katz is a realist artist, and Primitivism, Freud, and Marx are, well, not realistic. And, in my experience, artists who land on Primitivism, Freud, and Marx can’t draw to save their lives.
Gathering starts with Katz’s figure drawings from school. His aesthetic roots are there. Figures are in casual settings, flat, and made from planes of easy but engaging color. Katz admits to experimenting in the ’50s and destroying hundreds of paintings before he found a signature style with his collages, done from the mid ’50s to around 1960. They’re watercolor and cut, colored paper. Gathering displays 15 or so as a group packed together. I wish the curators had given them more space since they’re airy, lovely things that don’t need to be shown separately but in groups of two or three.
They’re diminutive and austere. A strip of paper creates a sand dune, deep blue watercolor the sky, and two people made from mere color make figures in Edwin and Ada on a Beach, from 1959. Sea, Land, and Sky, also from 1959, is three strips of color and a modern version of Luminism.
Katz said doing these collages was “the first time I really thought I was making art.” Both his style and technique from the late ’50s forward spring from these collages. For The Cocktail Party, Katz started with drawings of his guests. He then cut the drawings to the figure contours and arranged them. Once he got the model he wanted, he painted the picture.
In the late ’50s, Katz’s portrait style developed from his collages. He suspended his subjects in either a monochromatic negative background space, sometimes in a geometric space, and sometimes multiplied as if they were collage elements. He did this, he says, “because that’s what I want to paint, not who the person is or what he means to me, just how he looks.” Portraits of Paul Taylor, the dance impresario, and the artist Norman Bluhm show how effective Katz is.
Unlike the collages, where even subjects named in the title look generic, his portrait paintings are straight portraits. They’re big paintings, too. The portrait of Paul Taylor is 65 by 73 inches, so it’s a bit less than life-size. Clothes, gestures, and posture make real people, as does Katz’s pluck with paint. He applies paint texturally, not lushly or with dash but with just enough substance and, here and there, flourish that the figure shows weight and depth.
The Double Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg, from 1959, denies reality since the two Rauschenbergs, seated, turn toward each other. I think it’s a fantastic painting. Katz had wanted to paint Johns and Rauschenberg, then a couple, but Johns declined. He painted two Rauschenbergs instead. It’s a tip of his hat to Rauschenberg’s use of doubles in his own art, but it also beats Warhol by a few years in depicting multiples.
I saw Katz’s collages for the first time a few years ago in an exhibition at the Colby College Museum of Art. Colby, in Waterville, Maine, has a small, superb museum specializing in American art. I visit it every year since my husband went to Colby and the museum is on the way to Mount Desert Island.
The Colby museum has a big wing dedicated to Katz. It’s there because of the generosity of a manic collector and donor, Paul Schupf, who owned an impressive depth of work by Katz, Chuck Close, and Richard Serra. He offered Colby the bulk of his Katz collection on the condition that it built a wing that he, in part, funded. Colby, in those days, didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Katz was a neighbor, a Maine institution, and himself rich and to be cultivated. The museum took it. The wing, which looks like a warehouse, is there, and here I learned that a little of Katz goes a long way. Seeing his work in abundance means experiencing excess, redundance, and, before long, the chills.
No one gets the chills in looking at Katz’s portraits of his wife, Ada, whom he married in 1958. He painted hundreds of them, and they’re a moving chronicle of a love story now nearly 65 years old. I can’t think of an artist of note and heft, which Katz is, who’s depicted his wife so often. In Blue Umbrella, Ada looks like a mid-century sex-symbol movie star, both intense and distant. Ada Ada is a double portrait from 1959. As in the Rauschenberg double portrait, each Ada is different, though in degrees, not stance or look. Ada, and to a lesser extent Rauschenberg, serves a can’t-get-enough-of-you function.
The Black Dress, from 1960, shows six Adas, each in a different standing pose. It’s a riff on Cubism, which depicts a single figure from multiple perspectives and fractured into lots of different planes. Instead, Ada, in her little black dress, appears elegantly in sextuplicate. Black Scarf, from 1996, shows Ada aging but still elegant. Ada Evening, from 2019, shows his wife close to 90 in a mammoth portrait. Departure, from 2016, is a reprise of The Black Dress, with six Adas walking away, back turned to us, into the distance, set against a grass-green background.
Katz’s cutouts, along with his portraits of Ada, his ’50s and ’60s portraits of friends, and his collages are his very best work. His did his first cutout — a portrait of Frank O’Hara — in 1959. He aimed at a conventional oil-on-canvas portrait of O’Hara, wasn’t satisfied with the figure’s relationship with the background, cut the figure from the canvas, and mounted it on a sheet of wood. He trimmed the wood to the figure and stood it up. The direct environment becomes the background. The flat figure becomes a work of sculpture.
Half a dozen or so cutouts are in Gathering. They’re eerie and fun, eerie because they have presence, fun once a viewer understands that, for a split second, he glanced at a cutout and thought the figure was another person. The cutouts are flat, but Katz’s placement of feet and a turn of the head or the shoulders conveys depth. They tempt and taunt our imagination.
Katz’s march to a big, gaudy, boring brand begins in the late ’60s. A 96-by-72-inch portrait of Denby from 1972 is a lot of Denby. Katz’s portraits still focus on friends such as Denby, Yvonne Jacquette, and Burckhardt. American portraiture by this point had changed from a work for hire, where the patron expected atmosphere and a living likeness, to a work of choice, where the artist picked his subject and did with him what he would.
These portraits are drained of subjectivity, psychology, personality, drained of feeling. The people he paints look like mannequins slapped on billboards. Billboards have their own design necessities. They’re transitional art, meant to be seen and perceived in a flash. And, in so many of Katz’s portraits, and in lots of his other work, too, looking at them in a flash is what I do. Katz moves from the subtle gesture to performance. Generalized form, high-key color, sharp contours, and suppressed brushstroke deliver the billboard look that Katz wants. His figures are crisp and sleek like cars in a showroom. The poet Ted Berrigan’s portrait from 1967 was a relief. He actually looks ratty.
Katz says billboards inspire him. Sharon and Vivien, from 2009, is twelve feet wide. I think it’s ugly. It’s colorful in a shrill way, flat, and has no feeling. Round Hill has mystery, a spark I’d call “maybe” or “what if.” His billboard style offers no such possibility or intricacy. It’s a lazy painting, too. Katz admits he paints fast. These big clunkers go from conception to realization to the truck to his dealer with dispatch.
I have very mixed feelings about Katz as a landscapist. He did a few landscapes in the ’60s and ’70s. Luna Park, from 1960, shows light from a full moon radiating across the ocean in Maine. The moon and its beam are set between two spindly trees. It’s very beautiful, and it makes it clear that Katz had real mojo once. He learned at Skowhegan in the ’50s that Maine light is richer and darker than French light, the light of the Impressionists, or light in the American West. When he tackles Maine water-in-moonlight scenes such as Lake Light, from 1992, or Luna Park, he creates magic. These seem to be rare excursions, though. Ocean 9, Sunrise, White Reflection, and Yellow Tree, all big landscapes done in the last five years or so, are dreadful. Blown-up close-ups of trees, such as Fog, from 2015, are abuses of paint and canvas. It’s an 18-foot-wide picture of a couple of trees. Why? Because they sell. Katz is hottest in the German and Asian markets these days. They like thinking about American art as big and bold. Katz is a proven name.
Katz never fails in a small format, even when the CinemaScope version of the same scene is just bad painting. Landscape studies he’s painting now are about 9 by 12 inches and painterly. Black Scarf and many other paintings of Ava are small, too. They’re intimate, showing Katz for the fine painter he is.
I think Gathering is worth seeing for Katz’s collages, cutouts, small paintings, and portraits, since even the big ones are arresting, and also woodcuts, which are suited to large-scale and close-up subjects since they feel hewn. His portraits of Ada are, as a group, unique. It’s worth the view of Katz’s big paintings, often hideous the closer you get to them, from the courtyard at the Guggenheim looking up as they progress toward the top floor. Katz came of age when both the figure and realism were outré, but he had a vision that differed, and he stayed with it. That takes courage.
