Alex Katz, American born 1927
Alex Katz’s interest in figuration and representation took him away from the great art movements of his time even if he has borrowed formal elements from some of them.
Passing, 1962-63, oil on canvas
Alex Katz, American born 1929. ?Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
From Abstract Expressionism, big canvases; the all-overness of a canvas (every part of the canvas had equal interest to Jackson Pollock who wanted no center);
from Color theory, the bold idea that colors are, in themselves, characters worthy of attention;
from Andy Warhol and Pop art, the flat billboard boldness and appealing advertising glamour.
The artist’s portraits are of people whom he knows. With some he works. With others he socializes. Many are his artist peers.
These are idealized portraits of people as the artist sees them in a moment of time.
Portraits of people who are inward even though they may appear to be looking at you.
They are skin-level portraits: the viewer is not invited to a glimpse of their personalities or predilections or relationships with anyone in the same frame.
In very few portraits in this exhibition does anyone seem to be engaged with someone or something outside themselves.
One such image is of Joan Jonas.
Joan 2, 2020, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022 by the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
Joan Jonas, pioneer video and pioneer artist.
In this portrait of Edwin Denby, Denby’s eyes seem to indicate that his expression of delight is a result of activity in his brain and not in the world.
Portrait of Edwin Denby, 1972, oil on canvas
Alex Katz, American born 1927. On exhibit at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Even where there seems to be a hint of a story – two men at the artist’s summer house in Maine – the title the artist gives to the painting takes one away from the men and the house and into the light of a summer afternoon in a state famous for its evergreens and sea blues.
August, Late Afternoon, 1973, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1929. Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Edwin Denby and Rudy Burckhardt walking outside the artist’s yellow house in Lincolnville, Maine.
The viewer is not invited into the canvas.
Even when you think you might slip into a cocktail party at the artist’s New York loft (these figures were drawn from a real-life cocktail party and then repositioned on canvas)……
even when you think you might slip in,
you notice that nobody is engaging with anyone else. Everyone is detached.
This painting is about the way people are standing, holding their glasses and cigarettes and bodies, gesticulating, alert: the social mores of the time. This is a subject which fascinates the artist.
All the world being, as it is, a stage.
The Cocktail Party, 1965, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private collection loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
This detachment between people continues in later years when people are disporting themselves on beaches or in more intimate party settings or practicing ballet.
Katz began in the 1940s with soft focus portraits of individuals and groups,
Much impressed with the energetic inventions of the pioneer Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock, Katz began to engage with much larger canvases and white backgrounds of uneven colour and more energetic brushstrokes in the mid-1950s.
The cutout – where the painting conforms to the contours of the painted form – was an invention of the artist in 1959.
Five Women (Study for Times Square Mural), 1976, oil on aluminum
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private collection loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
This is a study for 5 of 9 women Alex Katz designed for a Times Square billboard which was in place between 1976 and 1982. The frieze – in which each woman looked left and was represented two or three times – was executed by professional billboard painters under Katz’s direction.
Likewise, fragmenting a portrait over several cutouts, as with the poet Allen Ginsburg below, was also a pioneering technique of Katz’s.
In the 1960s, the artist adopted the wet on wet method of painting: new layers of paint are added to the canvas before old ones are dry. The canvas is first primed several times in order to prevent the layers of paint seeping into the linen weave.
Speed takes precedence over everything else that the brain/hand does.
In the 1970s and ’80s, the artist began to refine his preparatory pencil drawings. Often these would then be enlarged into charcoal drawings on brown paper.
These would guide the final painting process.
The artist has spoken of his intense focus on “quick things passing” to try to capture what the eye/brain takes in of the hurly-burly of everyday life in one moment.
The artist is not about story telling.
Perhaps this is the main division between those who admire this work and those who do not.
When we are looking at figurative or representational work, we want a story; or the possibility of one.
Mistress and Maid, 1666-’67, oil on canvas.
Johannes Vermeer, 1632-1675, Dutch. Frick Collection, NY from whose website this photo
If we cannot have a full-scale story, we want pointers for our imagination to generate stories.
The Ladder, 1976, oil on canvas
Philip Guston, 1913-1980, American born Canada. I don’t recall the location of this painting.
Philip Guston was a pre-eminent, first generation Abstract Expressionist who was exiled by his peers and by critics when, in the late 1960s, he returned to figurative painting because, he said, he wanted – in the context of massive societal churn – to tell stories again.
If we cannot have this, our eyes glaze over and our facial muscles stiffen as if Botoxed.
detail of Sharon and Vivian, oil on linen, 2009
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private collection loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
The self-enclosed detachment is, however, the way many of us live.
We live in an Alex Katz urbanized, culturally sensitive, no-melting-pot, trigger-happy world. All of this to the post-Covid max now.
Avoiding eye contact and engagement.
I don’t know what it means that the artist uses his own family and friends and acquaintances – exclusively – to describe in paint an alienation which does not exist for him in the reality of his relationships.
Especially since it is barely possible to look – even for the briefest instant – at someone one knows without feedback from that someone within a nano second. Human feedback altering the face and eyes and mouth of seer and seen.
I find it tiring to hold these portraits in my mind.
They have no anchor there because the artist has obliterated the stories which linked him to them and them to each other.
I am not sure if this is an enlargement, a furthering – as Alex Katz set out to provide – of the figurative tradition.
Or a narrowing. An emptying.
detail of Bill 3, 2017, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1929. Artist’s loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim, NY in 2022
The dancer, choreographer and writer, Bill T. Jones
A hammering into a flatness without the bodies which are the throne of everything we are.
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Three Figures on a Subway, 1948, oil on board
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022 from the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
Early form of extreme expressionless facelessness.
Five People Seated at Table, 1950, oil on board
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Artist loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Early form of extreme expressionless facelessness.
Untitled, 1951, oil on board
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Whitney Museum, NY loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Early form of extreme expressionless facelessness.
Family Album, 1953, oil on board.
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private collection loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim in 2022
Early form of extreme expressionless facelessness.
Lake Time, 1955, oil on board
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim in 2022 by the Milwaukee Art Museum
Early form of extreme expressionless facelessness.
Alex Katz adopted portraiture – an unpopular art – as his primary focus in the late 1950s.
He painted those he knew. He painted them as they appeared to him in a moment of time.
His breakthrough came with these portraits, growing larger and more crystalline over time.
Track Jacket, 1956, oil on board
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2022 by the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
A self-portrait with the artist directing attention to the power that logos and fashion has on perception.
The beginning of the monochromatic one-colour backgrounds.
Rudy and Edith, 1957, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Artist loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2022
Rudy Burckhardt and Edith Schloss, artists. Rudy Burckhardt, Swiss photographer and film maker had a marked effect on Katz’s work. The artist’s move to a shallow frontal perspective can be seen in this image.
Lois, 1957, oil on board
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim, NY by the Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofia Madrid in 2022
Eli at Ducktrap, 1958, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
The child of a friend in a field in Maine showing the influence of the abstract canvases of the Color Field artists.
Irving and Lucy, 1958, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private collection loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY
Commemorating the marriage of Irving Sandler, art critic and Lucy Freeman, art historian. Sandler came to be a close critic of Katz’s work.
Frank O’Hara, 1959-60, oil on wood panel (cut-out)
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022 by the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
Influential poet, critic and curator, Frank O’Hara was an integral part of the artistic scene when the New York School was its greatest influence in the 1950s and ’60s.
Double Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg, 1959, oil on linen.
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2022 by the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
Katz’s idea was to do a double portrait of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Johns refused. Katz then painted a double portrait of Rauschenberg in imitation of portraits of President Eisenhower which Rauschenberg had himself done.
The effect of these double portraits was to undermine the idea of spontaneous mark-making dear to Abstract Expressionism.
Norman Bluhm, 1959, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Self-portrait, 1960, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Kynaston, 1963, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Artist’s loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Kynaston McShine, influential curator of 20th century art at MOMA, NY between 1968 and 2008; in melancholic mode which was, during the Renaissance, an indicator of genius.
Paul Taylor Dance Company, 1963-64
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private collection loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
This represents the 1963 dance performance, Scudorama, by this company. Katz designed its sets and costumes in garish colours to reflect the disordered quality of the dance.
Paul Taylor and the artist collaborated sixteen times in the course of their creative relationship. Katz’s group portraits reflected the choreographic work which he long witnessed and studied.
Edwin, Blue Series, 1965, oil and acrylic on composition board
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Whitney Museum of (North) American Art, NY
Edwin Denby, modernist poet and dance critic and close associate of a number of first generation Abstract Expressionists in whose work he instructed Alex Katz.
LeRoi Jones, 1963, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private collection loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Amiri Baraka, influential member of the Black Arts Movement of the 1950s and ’60s; political activist, poet, playwright. He was introduced to Alex Katz by the poet Frank O’Hara with whom he associated at the time of this portrait.
Study for Yvonne, 1965, oil on board
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Artist’s loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Yvonne Jacquette, an artist known for her aerial and panoramic paintings of New York city married Katz’s close friend, Rudy Burckhardt, in 1964.
Joe 1, 1966, oil on aluminum
Alex Katz, American born 1929. Private collection loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim in 2022
Joe Brainard, a visual artist, writer and poet.
Study for Ted Berrigan, 1967, oil on board
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Artist’s loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Influential poet who wanted to make his “poems be like my life.”
Mr. and Mrs. R. Padgett, Mr. and Mrs. D. Gallup, 1971, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private collection loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Anne, 1972, oil on board
Alex Katz, American born 1929. Private collection loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Anne Waldman, poet and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO.
The artist was always interested in the fashions his sitters chose.
Study for Stanley, 1973, oil on board
Alex Katz, American born 1929. Artist’s loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
this photo from hamilton-selway.com
Rudy and Yvonne, 1977, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2022 by the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
David and John, 1977, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private collection loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
John Ashberry, one of the most influential American poets of the last 50 years, and his partner (later husband), John Kermani.
Ashberry and Katz co-operated on two publications – 1969 and 2005 – with poems illustrated by Katz.
Round Hill, 1977, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Los Angeles County Museum loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Philip Pearlstein (1924- 2022), 1978, oil on aluminum cutout painted front and back.
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
This is a cut-out of the figurative artist, Philip Pearlstein. The window at the back is a real window of the museum.
Song, 1980, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private collection loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Meredith Monk, composer, singer, choreographer, playing the piano with the original members of the Vocal Ensemble, Andrea Goodman and Monica Solem.
Hiroshi, 1981, graphite on paper
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Artist’s loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Hiroshi Kawanishi, Japanese master print-maker.
Allen Ginsburg, 1985, oil on aluminum; six parts
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Artist’s loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Samantha, 1987, screenprint
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Artist’s loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Samantha McEwen, a member of the New York art scene during the 1980’s. This was created by Alex Katz and Hiroshi Kawanishi.
Anne, 1990, cut-out screen print on aluminum.
Alex Katz, American born 1927. The Jewish Museum, NY
Sharon and Vivian, oil on linen, 2009
Alex Katz, American born 1927. Private collection loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022
Isaac and Oliver, 2013, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1927. National Gallery, Washington, DC
Nicole, 2014, oil on canvas.
Alex Katz, American born 1929. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Bill 3, 2017, oil on linen
Alex Katz, American born 1929. Artist’s loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim, NY in 2022
The dancer, choreographer and writer Bill T. Jones
Vivien X5, 2018, screenprint
Alex Katz, American born 1929. Artist’s loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim, NY in 2022
Brazilian filmmaker, Vivien Bittencourt, the artist’s daughter-in-law
Cut-outs (details TBD) on the ramp of the museum
Alex Katz, American born 1929. On exhibit at the Solomon R. Guggenheim, NY in 2022