Forever Katz – Art & Antiques Magazine

The artwork from Alez Katz’s eight-decade career chronicles moments of life as they were and are now.

By Lilly Wei

Alex Katz turned 95 this past July. That’s hard to believe when looking at the artist and his work since both are characterized by an energy and presence that a 30-year-old might envy. He has been at this for almost eight decades, his dedication ferocious, and while to always bring up his venerability could smack of ageism, the reason it is remarkable (and we care) is not so much longevity per se as it is the perennial, exhilarating freshness of both his work and him. Richard Armstrong, the (soon departing) longtime director of the Guggenheim, said that he considers the artist’s last 10 years his most extraordinary, as he reflected on Katz’s upcoming show at the museum.

Katz is sometimes described as underknown, but underknown by whom? Certainly, anyone who knows anything about American art of the last half century know—and needed to know—about his work. And the far from reclusive artist has had over 250 solo exhibitions—and counting—with a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1986 and not including double that number of group shows, often with younger galleries and artists. The Guggenheim’s rotunda installation, “Alex Katz: Gathering,” is his second major museum survey, through February 20, 2023, curated by Katherine Brinson, the museum’s contemporary art curator. The earliest works on view are sketches of subway riders from the late 1940s, and the earliest painting is of his mother, Ella Marion, from 1946. The exhibition consists of paintings, oil sketches, collages, drawings, prints and freestanding figurative aluminum cut-outs that have an appealingly companionable presence.

The subjects are a solid selection of his repertoire. There are individual portraits, for which he is best known, in a range of formulations and there are group portraits that are also a collection of friends, family and acquaintances. The flowers he paints are typically not domesticated still lifes but blown up, sometimes spanning 12 feet across and more, dwarfing the viewer. Then there are the works with repeating figures, like a kind of animation sequence or a contemporized frieze (Egyptian art is a great interest of his and the bust of Nefertiti a favorite artwork), and, lastly, the landscapes that he has been painting since the late ’80s which have increasingly absorbed him, becoming more and more “environmental” in scale, toggling between varying degrees of abstraction and representation. Many are of grass-green fields or of trees such as the flourishing Yellow Tree 1 (2020), with swatches of blue to indicate quick peeks of sky through the foliage. Nocturnal scenes have also increasingly engaged him: city facades illuminated by streetlamps or streaked by rain; the dark waters of ocean and streams silvered by light.

Ada and Vincent, 1967. Oil on linen, 95 x 71 in.
Private Collection. © 2022 Alex Katz / Licensed by VAGA at Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Courtesy Alex Katz Studio.

Katz was born in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York, in 1927 and raised in St. Albans, Queens: a brash, unapologetic, competitive, outer borough kid, by his own account as well as others. His parents were Russian immigrants who let him do more or less what he wanted to do (because they more or less approved), which, no doubt, further bolstered his sense of self-sufficiency. Many second-generation children either rose to the occasion or fell. He rose. Katz liked to draw from a very young age and later went to Woodrow Wilson High School, a public school rather than the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), because it allowed him greater freedom to choose his own course of study. It was also home to trends in music, dance and fashion that were more innovatively and audaciously stylish than he would have encountered in privileged, more conventional schools.

He went to Cooper Union, graduating in 1949, and then to Skowhegan where he was introduced to plein air painting, a revelation for him, as was the light of Maine. He said that he had destroyed hundreds and hundreds of paintings in the decade that followed until his technique improved, his breakthrough occurring in 1959. He would tell young artists that if they were serious about painting, they would have to paint six hours a day, six days a week and it will take five or six years to find out where they were. That’s what he did and still does, in the studio every day, his oil on linen paintings—classic materials that he’s used from the beginning—propped wherever there is space, his life and art inseparable. He met Ada, his wife, in 1957 and they married the following year. It’s no spoiler alert to say the rest is (art) history.

Among the early settlers of SoHo, he and his family moved into the spacious, light-filled top floor of a downtown loft building in 1968 where he still lives and works. Before that, he had other studios in the area, living illegally as many artists did then, in danger of eviction, often without heat and other usual conveniences. While many may recall those days with nostalgia, Katz refused to romanticize them; they were what they were. Perhaps memories of the hardships of those early days were among the reasons that he established the Alex Katz Foundation in 2005. Characteristically, it functions in a straightforward manner. The works are purchased from artists, often a few years out of school, the period they need the most support, he believes, selected by Katz and his son Vincent (a well-regarded poet, critic, translator, curator) and then donated to selected museums.

Ada Ada, 1959. Oil on linen, 49 1⁄2 x 50 in.
Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Golden, 1963. © 2022 Alex Katz / Licensed by VAGA at Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Courtesy Alex Katz Studio.

Katz’s mantra is to paint in the present tense, to stay in the present. Painting, he said, is the reflection of an absolute and complete moment of awareness. It is a fleeting glimpse of something seen briefly that he is driven to capture, to record. He also follows another precept which is to portray what is in front of him. For Katz, that means downtown New York, coastal Maine and his (large) circle of family, friends, and acquaintances such as artist Robert Rauschenberg, poets Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and Ted Berrigan, dancer and choreographer Paul Taylor, critic Irving Sandler and his wife, the scholar Lucy Sandler. That, of course, includes Vincent, the photographer Vivien Bittencourt, his son’s wife, and their family, and above all Ada, who has been Katz’s muse and subject for almost as long as he has been a practicing artist. Her portraits, of which there are around 1,000, are not only a document of her life, and of his, but of a time in the life of America, and his magnum opus. We see her as she changes from a young, winsome, dark-haired beauty to scarfed and sunglassed 1960s sophistication to motherhood and to her later years, her face increasingly regal, aging naturally, with, yes, amazing grace. The paintings of Ada are also a timeline of Katz’s artistic evolution, as he shifts from the painterly and more detailed renderings to the linear, the flattened and simplified, pushing his scale upward, while he was also refining, paring down and experimenting with color to create a new, instantly recognizable standard of American style.

While there are many portraits to pick from, we might follow this progression from a softly brushed, somewhat out-of-focus 1959 double portrait of Ada full length against a pale, deftly painted monochrome ground, to the cleanly graphic, gorgeous The Red Smile (1963), cropped so that her face fills half the frame, balanced by a smooth swath of red of equivalent impact. Then there is Ada and Vincent (1967), Ada’s precise, pensive, light-patterned face a perfect Piero della Francesca oval above Vincent’s head, brushed by his hair, her hand tenderly touching the boy’s cheek, his expression anxious, the pose underscoring with psychological astuteness the intimacy between mother and child. And there is Departure (Ada) (2016) which shows her repeated six times, placed in a single row near the top of the painting, the small figures turning their backs to us (recalling, in its painterliness, some of his earliest portrayals of her), against a rich expanse of green, the title double-edged, both matter of fact and poignant.

Yellow Tree 1, 2020. Oil on linen, 72 x 72 in.
Private Collection, Republic of Korea. © 2022 Alex Katz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery.

Katz is the perfect artist for one vision of America. He personifies assurance, especially self-assurance, underscoring what was once central to the American dream: that you could invent yourself here and become whomever you wanted to be—the reason that The Great Gatsby is considered by some to be the Great American Novel, never mind that it was a dream derailed—mirroring the similarly triumphant belief of an ascendant country at mid-century. A potent mix of idealism, optimism and pragmatism, it was activated by fierce desire, hard work and utter commitment. It still holds sway, even if that dream has become tarnished and is much more complicated and conflicted now. His signature style was sourced and crosspollinated in the common culture of the times, by Pop, minimalism, magazines, posters, comic books, billboards, movie screens, things that were big, bright, bold, easily parsed, with immediate, unpretentious appeal. Style and appearance have always caught his eye, as have facts, not metaphors. As for his influences, we can see, randomly, Hokusai, Utamaro, Matisse and so many others, so much more. Katz once said that artists are influenced by everything around them, which seems irrefutable.

And yet, straightforward and no nonsense as Katz prides himself on being, looking at paintings like Lake Light (1992), say, you might call him a romantic, after all. Spangled and sparkling, the water cleaved by a radiant white that seems a wavering moonlighted path to the infinite, he captures, as well as anyone, the miracle of the world and the poetics of nature. Or, he might just say, with his well-known candor and a smile of sorts—baloney.