Alex Katz

Once he began painting and drawing, Alex Katz never let go of the figure. Born in New York in 1927, he came of age in the late 1940s and 1950s at a time when his fellow students at the Cooper Union School of Art in Manhattan and the Skowhegan School for Sculpture and Painting in Maine were immersed in abstract art. Katz’s hold on the figure must be seen as a definitive statement of artistic independence. Much like his friend Fairfield Porter and his Cooper Union instructor Robert Gwathmey, Katz painted figures in a decidedly modern but recognizable way. His early paintings, often groups of full-length figures with sketchy faces, set in undefined landscapes, are characterized by a dark palette and loose paint application.

In the mid-1950s, Katz’s palette lightened considerably, forecasting the bright colors of his mature work. At the same time, the sketchy quality of his earlier brushwork gave way to a harder, clean-edged style marked by broad, flat planes of color. His people, formerly featureless, acquired faces and expressions. The changes proved successful, and he had his first one-person exhibition at Roko Gallery in New York in 1954.

Perhaps ironically, Katz credits the influence of Jackson Pollock with the radical change in style that brought him critical and public attention. It was Pollock’s large scale and his use of the entire canvas that inspired Katz to magnify his figures so that they dominate the picture plane. On the other end of the visual culture spectrum, graphic advertising, specifically billboards, led Katz to experiment with large-scale paintings and radical cropping. [1] Magnified and often cropped so that many of the canvases show the figures only from above the shoulders, his paintings from the 1960s onward are both iconic and instantly recognizable, as for example, The Red Smile, 1963, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Katz’s most frequent portrait subjects were his friends and family. He has painted his wife Ada, whom he married in 1958, in countless guises over five decades. Serving as his muse, she is immediately identifiable by her dark, straight, shoulder-length hair and large brown eyes. Their son Vincent, born in 1960, also appears frequently, growing from a child to a youth to a young man on the canvas, as in Vincent with Open Mouth, 1970, Wake Forest University Student Union Collection of Contemporary Art. Katz turns repeatedly to the poets, artists, writers, and dancers that make up his circle of friends, such as painter Robert Rauschenberg and dance critic Edwin Denby. At times, figures are placed against a blank background, all evidence of setting and attributes omitted. In other instances, his subjects enjoy cocktail parties, lounge by the waterside, and engage in conversation and leisure activities.

Katz treats his landscapes, often depictions of his summer home in Maine, with the same cool remove he demonstrates toward the subjects of his portraits. He is always less interested in capturing mood or conveying emotion than, as he said himself, dealing with appearance: “I like my paintings to deal most with appearance. Style and appearance are the things that I’m more concerned about than what something means. I’d like to have style take the place of content, or the style be the content. It doesn’t have to be beefed up by meaning. In fact, I prefer it to be emptied of meaning, emptied of content.” [2]

The artist has also explored new media, techniques, and art forms. In the 1950s, Katz began making “cutouts,” figures painted on wood or aluminum, then cut out and mounted on stands, experimenting with scale and cropped forms in startling and innovative ways. In 1965, he began making prints, and his efforts in lithography, etching, silkscreen, and linoleum and woodcut have led to an accomplished body of work. The artist has also designed stage sets for dance and theater projects and collaborated with writer-friends to produce book illustrations.

One of America’s most celebrated artists, Katz has received numerous awards and accolades, and been the subject of several monographs. The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a retrospective exhibition in 1986, followed by an exhibition of his prints in 1988 at the Brooklyn Museum. Always a stalwart figurative painter, Katz also verges on abstraction. As his friend Porter observed: “Katz is a ‘realist,’ meaning that you recognize every detail in his painting, and the whole too, though the whole takes precedence and the detail may be only an area of color, in short, abstract.” [3]

Notes:

[1] Richard Marshall, Alex Katz (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1986), 14 and 19.

[2] Katz, quoted in Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940-1985 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 57.

[3] Porter, in Rackstraw Downes, ed., Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism, 1935–1975 (New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1979), 90–91.