THANK HEAVEN
FOR LITTLE PICTURES
Alex Katz: Small
Paintings
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
Whitney Museum of
American Art at Philip Morris
120 Park Avenue
Alex Katz: The Woodcuts
and Linocuts
Peter Blum
99 Wooster
Alex Katz: Large
Paintings
PaceWildenstein
534 West 25th Street
Elizabeth Peyton
Gavin Brown's Enterprise
436 W 15th St
Thomas Nozkowski
Max Protetch
511 West 22nd Street
James Siena
Gorney Bravin & Lee
534 West 26th Street
By
DAVID COHEN
exhibition
catalogue cover shows detail of Ada 1990
oil on board, 12 x 9 inches
collection of the artist
After looking at Alex Katz, the world begins to look like a Katz painting.
Life imitates art, with good taste for once. A while ago I was at the
Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, to see Alex Katz: Small
Paintings, the show currently bifurcated between the Whitney's uptown
premises and their room at the Philip Morris Building. Back in early
summer it was at its originating venue, the Addison Gallery of American
Art, at the Phillips. Strolling around the campus of this exclusive
prep school, with its fine colonial architecture, the sumptuous brick
and white boards against green lawns and blue sky, I was in a WASP idyll.
Only a Samuel Barber soundtrack was needed to complete the picture.
But post-Katz the scene was soon inflected with New York edge. Bold
reductions, cropping, and jazzy juxtapositions suggested themselves.
A group of kids was engrossed in a team game of Frisbee. A young black
woman among otherwise all-male all-white company particularly shone
(or at least drew my attention). Inevitably, she brought to mind His
Behind the Back Pass 1978, Katz's picture of his son Vincent as
a latter-day, all-American discus thrower. Frisbee is the perfect Katzian
motif, a game at once balletic and robust, flippant (you literally throw
it away) and yet Zen-like in its focus. Frisbee demands concentrated
skill but must be carried off with suave nonchalance. Something hot
done in a cool way.
Right now's New
York is friendly to Katz lovers. Besides the Whitney double-decker,
there's The Woodcuts and Linocuts, organized by Colby College
Museum of Art, at the Peter Blum Gallery; there was a gem of a show
of early works at Robert Miller; and to counterbalance the small paintings,
there's Big Paintings, a show of new work at PaceWildenstein,
at their new Chelsea barn. "Katz" and "Big" have
been in danger of becoming synonyms in recent years; thus a focus on
small offers a novel glance at this muralist of cool. The small pictures
tend to be more painterly, with greater evidence of the brush and the
hand behind it. And ultimately, in a way, of the eye behind the hand,
too, because if big represents synthesis and resolution, small intimates
the perceptual, the initial rapport with the observed world. While the
big Katz stretches credibility by doing perverse things with form, the
small Katz, quirky in less calculated ways, actually enhances a sense
of actuality. The cool and resolved big contrasts with the warm and
experimental small. Small is comparatively quick, impatient, impressionistic,
it is also more intent on confronting perceptual problems than big,
so there is greater involvedness and naturalistic (rather than stylized)
awkwardness.
Several images in
the Addison's version of Small Paintings now find themselves in PaceWildenstein's
Big Paintings. These are among the ten portraits that are studies
for the monumental ten by twenty foot Ada's Garden 2000. The
proximity of big and small on adjacent walls sheds light on the perceptual-synthetic
dualism in Katz. The small studies really glow, almost literally in
the way the figures are haloed by pentimenti. The black backgrounds,
animatedly brushy at the reduced scale, are evened out into sheer expanses
of matt blackness, to complement the lush resolve of opened-out forms.
What really happens, of course, between the perceptual small and the
synthetic big is that awkwardness is transferred from the artist's brush
to the viewer's eye. The small Vincent is an unmistakable likeness of
his son even at thirty feet; telltale signs like a gentle snarl and
jutting of jaw are keenly observed. But writ large, rather than being
retained through some caricatural mechanism they are jettisoned in favor
of generalization. The individual slinks away into the crowd.
Decorative flatness
and convincing realist space have often dueled before in Alex Katz images,
but in Carver's Corner - to my mind the most audacious painting
in his new show - the artist ups the ante. In the right hand scene in
this divided composition, the sky and treetops at the top "ground"
the image while the flat, green non-space below is an abstraction within
which, nonetheless "grounded" and convincingly lit figures
are positioned. Somehow, the picture obliges us to submit to its own
logic.
Alex
Katz top down: Green Cap 1984, oil on board, 12 3/16 x
17 3/16 inches, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of the
artist, 97.44.4; Vincent and Merlin, both oil on board,
12 x 16 inches, courtesy PaceWildenstein; Ada's Garden [detail]
2000, oil on canvas, Des Moines Art Center, Purchased with funds from
the Coffin Fine Arts Trust; Nathan Emory Coffin Collection of the Des
Moines Art Center; Carver's Corner 2000, oil on canvas, 10 ft
6 x 13 ft 8, right hand panel only, Courtesy of PaceWildenstein.
Several shows by
other artists about town right now [actually all three shows plus Big
Paintings ended the day of publication, for which apologies to reader
and author alike- Ed.] give one cause to celebrate paintings one can
slip into a pocketbook (or at least a backpack). The cynic might say
this is a recession market's "behind the back pass", tempting
tidbits for the Wall Street weary. Three shows are especially deserving
of attention, in my opinion, and each says something specific about
scale.
Thomas Nozkowski
has an uncanny ability to seem utterly preoccupied by form while quietly
attending to style. His small paintings contrast, strategically, with
Katz's in a crucial regard. In Katz, one could say that the small works
are paintings, the big pictures. By this I mean that while the small
emphasize their own making, their matière, the bigger ones are
machines, cinematic and transparent. Nozkowski habitually paints small,
and professes to have done so from early in his career for political
reasons (not wanting to decorate bank lobbies but to make works his
peers could afford). But it seems to me there is a more aesthetically
interesting reason for his scale, which is where style over form comes
into play. All the while that he uses organic shapes, patterns, textures,
these relate to observed phenomena in the real world. They may to some
extent have been existentially discovered in the painting process, but
thanks to their diminutive scale, they have the energy of depiction.
In this sense, they are post-abstract. They retain what they want, lexiconically,
from the achievements of modernist abstraction, but refer back to an
older, (old-masterly) tradition of picture making that predates any
sense of "getting lost" in the painting process, in the way
described (and exemplified) by Jackson Pollock. The paradox in Nozkowski
is that precisely because of their reticence - they can have a held
back, cramped, even anal execution sometimes - they are all the more
lithe and inventive. Their authenticity arises from being stylistically
self-conscious.
There is a similar
"authentic despite" quality to Elizabeth Peyton, the Watteau
of blah. Katz and Hockney are her most conspicuous contemporary artistic
heroes, choices, when they were made a decade or so ago, that were almost
poignantly retro in themselves. I mention Watteau because of an insouciant
whimsicality underpinned by psychological substance. Another old master
she recalls in this respect is Forain. It's in drawing technique, specifically,
that she resembles Hockney, whereas the kinship with Katz mostly has
to do with brinkmanship. She constantly bids high in her wagers against
naffness. In her case, the traffic between the synthetic and the perceptual
runs in the opposite direction from Katz (or Nozkowski). With Peyton,
falsity and mediation are the sine qua non alike of source and style:
she starts with media images of pop stars and House of Windsor princelings,
or with snapshots of downtown boho friends posing so nonchalantly they
might as well be minor celebrities. Her painterly style proceeds to
flirt rampantly with the fashion plate, as Katz seems to with the billboard
and the cartoon. What makes her highly wrought images so tantalizing,
in my opinion, is the exquisite correlation between emotional attitude
and painterly investment. In Katz, a twist of poignancy gives edge to
his high jinks with style. In Peyton, where sloppiness and feyness characterize
so perfectly an alienated, narcissistic longing, it's not a twist but
the whole fruit that is thrown in.
My only problem
with Peyton's paintings is that I feel I'm on a perpetual first date.
Nice feeling, but will this go anywhere? I'm sorry to keep comparing
everyone to Katz but seeing his latest works at PaceWildenstein with
a small display of gems from the 1950s a block away, at Robert Miller,
really brought home the extraordinary phenomenon of an artist virtually
arriving on the scene with a fully formed, internally coherent, personal
language which nonetheless had within it phenomenal space for growth,
change, challenge. Peyton's painterly touch is so loaded with emotional
implication as to be circumscribed by it as well. When, as recently,
she attempts to go bigger she gains little. It is as if her touch is
good for intimation only, which is a bit of a tease. Having said that,
Paradis (Kirsty) 2001, gives some grounds for hope, with its
ethereal opening up of forms amid the breathing space around the brushmarks.
But comparison of painted things within the painting is a sad give away
of the difference between a master and an acolyte. The tattoo in Ben
Drawing 2001 is feeble (unlike Ben's actual drawing, which is perfect).
In Katz, drawn or painted things in the real world - markings on a canoe,
lipstick or eye shadow on a face, fabric designs - masterfully accentuate
the play of artifice and reality. They also underpin the self-containment
of his painted vision, its internal logic: the way painted things are
contiguous with his handwriting while seamless with the world. But perhaps
such technical issues come down to time as much as talent. Peyton gives
us cause for great hope. As Bad Painting goes, she is as good as it
gets.
In this feast of
small painters, we leave James Siena for dessert (crème brulée,
if an awful pun on his name can be forgiven). Entering the private view
of his current show at Gorney Bravin & Lee, an artist friend more
familiar with his oeuvre exclaimed, "These are murals by James's
standard!" At around 19 by 15 inches, on average, these are apparently
a big step up for an artist whose exquisite meditations on the decorative
veer towards the microscopic. But none of this should consign his vision
to any category of slightness. Evoking such disparate associations (off
the top of my head) as African textiles, Gustav Klimt, Adolph Gottlieb's
pictographs, Bridget Riley's swirls, Moghul miniatures, the nutty visions
of Friedensreich Huntertwasser, tantric art, Escher drawings, Aztec
architecture, Keith Haring, Yayoi Kusama, and Maori tattoos they absorb
energies from these sources without being retro or referential. They
are self-contained aesthetic experiences. If in any sense they are depictive
then they depict the universe in a grain of sand. Coming at the them
for a second visit after looking at Elizabeth Peyton I was struck by
an unexpected commonality between her camp smudges of lipstick and the
way traces of pink track the blue lines in Siena's Blue Corner Painting
2001. The DNA of small painting throws up unlikely family connections.
How happy under the lens of a Chelsea afternoon to discover such siblings
under the skin.
Tom
Nozkowski above: Untitled (8-8); below: Untitled (8-10)
both 2001, oil on linen on panel,
16 x 20 inches, courtesy of Max Protetch Gallery
Elizabeth
Peyton top: Prince William at the Queen Mother's Birthday
2001 oil on board 10¼ x 8 1/8 inches; middle: Ben Drawing
2001 oil on board 10 1/8 x 8¼ inches; bottom:
Paradis (Kirsty) 2001 oil on board 40 x 30 inches, courtesy Gavin
Brown's Enterprise, Corp.
James
Siena above: Blue Corner Painting 2000, 19¼ x 15
1/8 inches; below: Lattice Painting (Red) 2000-2001, 29
1/16 x 22 11/16 inches, both enamel on aluminum, courtesy of Gorney
Bravin & Lee
