Published
in modified form as “A Scaled-Up World” in Art in America May 1998
(cover story)
In
the ‘90s, Alex Katz has clearly taken to painting big. True, painting on a large scale is not a new
development in his career: back in 1977, for instance, he collaborated with a
sign painter to produce murals for Times Square which held their own against
the neon and advertising hordings. His
flattened, generic figures painted larger than life have anyway been likened to
billboards. But now in his early
seventies Katz is painting bigger than ever, routinely working in Guernica-like
dimensions with 20 foot long landscapes and figure compositions. Intimacy and blankness cohabit these works
in such unlikely harmony that a big Alex Katz still pulls the viewer up short,
however much the artworld is used to the museum scale.
Luckily,
his reputation seems to be keeping pace with his painterly ambition, as
gargantuan exhibition spaces make themselves available to him. A show of two dozen big pictures newly
acquired by Charles Saatchi, mostly recent pieces but some dating back to 1972,
filled the collector's private museum in London early in 1998. It was Katz's first major showing in
England. The P.S.1 Museum in New York,
that Spring, set aside over two floors of its recently renovated premises to
its own traveling exhibition, Alex Katz Under the Stars: American Landscapes
1951-1995.
Of
course, in art as in other important matters, size isn't everything. But Katz fills the space and warrants the
attention. He is now painting at the
zenith of his creative powers, these mammoth pictures stretching his
considerable technical and painterly prowess to new limits. For much of his
career Katz has been popular and commercially successful thanks to his cool,
urbane and accessible subject matter and style. But perhaps precisely because of this very pleasantness he has
never been counted among the first rank of living American artists. Understanding of what his highly stylized,
seemingly nonchalent paintings are really about has mostly been confined to
fellow practioners. Fairfield Porter
was an early enthusiast. A generation
later Chuck Close was typical of an artist seeking a radical new realism for
whom Katz was an exemplar. In the 1980s
he became something of a role model for postmodern painters like Jennifer
Bartlett, Eric Fischl, David Salle, Francesco Clemente. Now that his work is proving a point of
departure to even younger artists, the time for reassesment is surely due.
If
Alex Katz is hard to place within the narrative sweep of American modernism it
is not because he is a romantic outsider chasing private demons; on the
contrary, his art can seem fashionable to a fault in its awareness of esthetic
debates. Katz is a maverick rather in
the way he has been prepared to synthesize disperate esthetics, to take from,
and contribute to, competing traditions, and all the time cultivate an original
approach. He takes his place in the
tradition of American realism: at a certain level his socially acute portraits
with their introverted smiles, his groups intermingly with studied casualness
at beach parties and barbeques, operate as sauve social updates of Hopper. (Hoppers for an age of affluence and
tranquillisers.) But far from rejecting
Abstract Expressionism, which stood in fierce opposition to realism in its
emerging years, Katz drew upon the newer movement's energy and ambition.
By
treating vernacular and contemporary subjects in an avantgarde style Katz also
gets blurred in historic consciousness with Pop, a movement he vaguely
anticipated. Andy Warhol is reported to
have said, on finishing his first Marilyn paintings, "Gee, they look like
Alex Katzes", or words to that effect.
Katz's double, triple and multiple portraits of his wife and muse, Ada,
could also have served as a precedent for Warhol's rows of screenprinted simulacra. Like Warhol, and others of the same
generation, Katz used glamor and fashion in a fine art context, taboos to the
puritanical, highminded modernists of the previous generation. He shared some concerns with Pop, but not
others, so to view him as a watered-down Pop artist is a sore injustice. In terms of sensibility, Katz and Warhol are
a gulf apart: at the risk of triteness, one is cool where the other is
cold. There is a similarly metaphoric
difference in temperature between Katz and his contemporary Jasper Johns. Both artists address issues of style and the
status of painting and the relation of form and content. While Johns has the more substantial
reputation it seems to me that Katz's approach is more subtle. Johns is emphatically art-about-art; Katz
hits the same buttons but obliquely, in the process of attending to the making
of beautiful paintings which are also images about the real world.
The
last decade has propelled Katz into new painterly terrain. In a recently issued volume of memoirs, the
artist has recounted how his 1986 Whitney Museum retrospective proved a turning
point for him. "I realized some
painters, after their retrospectives, go on and paint masterpieces a little
worse than before, or a little better, it doesn't matter. I wanted to move to a place in art that was
unstable and terrifying."[1] The new subject into which he launched
himself was literally a shot in the dark - his night paintings. A departure from his bright palette and
typically sunny disposition, these images of New York at night nonetheless
pointed to typical Katz traits, with their evenness of tone, areas of near
monochrome, and charged, poetical sense of emptiness. Dark, ethereal landscapes pitted the black outlines of buildings
against still night skies, with soft-glowing electric lights the only clues as
to the buildings' orientation.
Varick
1988, is in my estimation his masterpiece within the genre of night
paintings. Almost a frieze, at five
foot by twelve, it is his most severely minimal work, consisting of half a
dozen small windows set against a sheer expanse of black. The composition is severely reductive, and
the jabs and sweeps of white denoting flourescent light strips against glass
are economical to the point of being sparse, but it would be a mistake to
imagine Katz capable of reductivism in pursuit of some conceptual agenda. The picture is electrifying as much for its
convincing effect as for the bravura of its minimal means. The tiny, dollshouse details - the black
verticals puncturing the drag of white to denote window frames, the change of
angle of the last window on the right to describe the corner of the building,
the diagonals of the light strips "behind" their shimmering light
bouncing off the glass, but actually painted on top, impress the viewer
simultaneously as virtuoso and nonchalent.
Flatness
and facility, which are hallmarks of Katz's style, are pushed to a new limit
here, begging the question, how are they "unstable and
terrifying"? The risk in Katz has
always been the subtle risk of blandness, rather than the stock in trade risks
of the avant garde: reduction ad absurdam, the baring of soul, the violation of
taboos. Katz has been prepared to risk
seeming too easy - vacuous even - eliciting from impatient viewers a
disconsolate "So What?" The
night paintings were more stylishly minimal than anything else in Katz's
oeuvre. To those who don't click with
Alex Katz, his portraits and group compositions, for all the absence of
narrative and lack of expression, hold out the compensation of human
interest. Iconic and generalised though
they are, they possess an undeniable "real presence". If nothing else, they hold attention with
their insights into the mood of social interaction. The landscapes and cityscapes, however, throw away these
lifelines: they work on Katz's own painterly terms or not at all.
Landscape
came to dominate his output over the next ten years. Not that landscape hadn't been one of his themes all along, or
that figures dropped out, but the priority shifted discernibly. After he launched into the night paintings
he found a new subject in Black Brook, a piece of land adjoining his summer
house in Maine. (He has spent every
summer in Maine since 1949 when he attended the summer program at Skowhegan.) Again, darkness was an issue, as the brook
gets its name from its light-depriving over-arching trees. Dense woodlands and snowy winterscapes yielded different opportunities for
all-over, even-tempered, eventless, unromantic, unexpressive treatments. Indeed, these landscapes seemed an ultimate
vehicle for the dichotomy that lies at the heart of Katz's enterprise between
artifice and reality.
His
art is balanced between abstraction and realism, not because he is on the way
to one or the other, but because more radically and decisively he has found a
space between the two which suits his personality. His vision is too mortgaged to the actual and the observed for
form to triumph over content, but at the same time too cool and stylish and
diffident for the subject to assert an existence apart from the means of its
conveyance. Some works in his last
Marlborough Gallery show (April 1996) teetered so precariously towards a
decorativeness quite divorced from any claim to the real that they seemed
deliberately to flirt with that danger.
Hayfield IV 1995, for instance, a nine foot by twelve foot
golden-yellow "field" with exquisitely stylised flowers (apparently
black-eyed susans) sparesely dotted around comes close to pure decoration;
apart from some minimal intimations of grass and stems there is little to
relate the pictorial ground to actual ground (the earth). Katz is so good at eliciting contradictory
responses. Hayfield can
reasonably be described both as tight in design and loose in seemingly nonchalent,
random, open composition. The
experience goes right back to the pulsating paired-down little landscapes he
produced in the 1950s: in Two Trees 1955, for instance, a couple of
trees on a diagonal horizon burst with energy that animates the warm complement
of golden earth and yellow sky.
These
early landscapes and the touching collages of that period defy their size by
evoking expansiveness. He has claimed
that he made small works in the 1950s in reaction to the over-heated attitudes
of the Abstract Expressionists.
Although he was in awe of the "heroic" generation of the New
York School, seeking to emulate first Pollock and then De Kooning and striking
up a friendship with Kline whom he also admired, he felt temperamentally ill at
ease with the romanticism and bombast of those artists. And yet, when he started to paint big in the
1960s it was partly to stake the claim that realism should be taken as
seriously as abstraction. (Georgia
O'Keefe admitted to painting big for a similar reason.) Another impetus to bigness was his
infatuation with billboards, which may have culminated in the 1977 Times Square
commission but dated back much earlier in his career, even to before James
Rosenquist's show of billboard-like pop works in 1961 which impressed him
deeply. In Katz's more recent
landscapes, size works to envelop the viewer in much the way of Monet's late
masterpieces. (It must have chaffed
Katz to have his recent landscapes compared favourably to late Monet by his
former detractor Hilton Kramer[2].)
Whatever
inspires Katz to paint big, one of the side effects of blowing up images is to
accentuate the artifice of painting as a language of representation. The raw elements of painterly depiction -
subtleties of modeling or shading and expressive turns of the brush - get away
with certain things on a close-knit, intimate scale but when they are blown-up
these devices are stretched and pulled until first credibility and then
legibility are harder and harder to sustain.
In traditional painting, where the aim is to avoid all ambiguities,
great virtuosity is required in the build up of scale. Katz's project, however, nestles between the
traditional desire to communicate and a radical inclination to probe and challenge
the language of art. His style braves
the tightrope between artifice and reality, stiltedness and fluency,
awkwardness and accuracy. In a way he
is contemporary painting's Holy Fool, making an image which seem totally gauche
one moment, extraordinarily acute the next.
Woods
1991, a fourteen foot long canvas in both the Saatchi and P.S.1 exhibitions,
offers a clear instance of the effect of scale on the status of
brushmarks. The composition is divided
vertically by five poplars in the foreground, while more trees are cursorily
denoted to help describe the receding space.
The foreground trunks are drastically cropped to their torsos, sparing
the composition the formal complications of roots or branches. Scattered across the picture are what can be
taken as leaves, varyingly light green and yellow dabs against the increasingly
dark verdure of the background. The
whole effect is pictorially sumptuous and absorbing, giving an immediate sense
of subject and season. But as the eye
lingers, individual marks soon peel away (metaphorically speaking) from their
depictive function within the painted scheme.
Big brush-thick strokes of white that denote light (or white bark) along
the sides of the trunks stand proud of the picture surface. So too the dabs that are the leaves (the
painting does not emphasise whether these are falling leaves or fluttering
foliage) step forward to be counted, some of them twisting awkwardly at odd
angles to the flow of the design, others smudging their way into the anyway
flattened ground. Areas of dark green,
which give such dramatic depth to the composition, also appear, on closer
inspection, as rather brushy, gestural shapes, and when so noticed begin to
push forward, defying their role as signifiers of depth. But none of this autonomous play of the
paint robs the work of its representational cogency. The unravelling of these constituent elements is a sensual game
in which they are allowed to go back, at any moment, to being light on the side
of the tree, or receding depth in a wood, rather like the toys in Tchaikowsky's
Nutcracker which are at once inanimate objects and dancing characters.
To
Merlin James, author of the deft commentaries that accompany the plates of the
Saatchi catalog, Woods and related pictures are "witty decodings of
New York School painterly abstraction...The units of painterly language - the
dab, the stroke and the field - are given as free and expansive a range as in
any informal nonfiguration, but they achieve it through describing a motif
which is itself random, overall. The
motif has been chosen for its abstraction; this is art imitating nature
imitating art."[3] I wonder, however, whether Katz is actually
as deconstructive as Merlin James seems to intimate. Sure, he loves to paint what are already painted things in the
world, like made-up faces - painted lips, eyebrows. Studio sitters often pose
in front of recently completed Alex Katzes, reinforcing the association of his
work with stage scenery. Often he
teases out the conundrum of decorative motifs within a reality which is itself
rendered decorative by being in his style.
The branch and flower motif on the woman's collar against the real trees
flanking her in January III 1992 drives home how precarious is the
exchange rate between the currencies of artifice and reality in Katz's painting
world. The way in this picture the
portrait spatially and conceptually intrudes into the middle of the landscape
recalls Katz's young admirer David Salle.
The sharp cropping of her right side, a trope of Katz's, relates to his
interest in Ukiyo-e prints and cinema, but unlike Salle, who delights in the
conflict of rival layers of imagery, the juxtaposition of Katz's two pictorial
spaces is, on closer inspection, less drastic.
The hand drawn right hand side of the portrait space, though severe, has
a slight bow that rhymes with the bending trees. The purpose of Katz's balancing acts - and their effect - always
have more to do with heightening equilibrium than with breaking down language,
suggesting a modernist not a postmodern sensibility.
The
new priority given to landscape, and the increasing tendency to bigness,
reconnects Katz with his aesthetic mood at the outset of his career. At that time "open form" was a
wild and liberating opportunity, whether encountered in Jackson Pollock's
all-over lyrical drip abstractions, or the free-style of the jazzmen who
hypnotized the young artist, notably Stan Getz and Miles Davis.
After
studying at Cooper Union - which he has described as being "provincial
modernist" - in the late 1940s, Katz followed the summer program at the
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture for two years in succession, in 1949
and 1950. In comparison to Cooper,
Skowhegan was "provincial regionalist". There for the first time he was enticed to paint en plein air. As he recounts in his memoir, this was like
"feeling lust for the first time"[4]. He found he could paint fast, and decided
this is where his talent lay. But later
in the 1950s Katz's style developed in a way that took him away from open forms
to tightness and closure. He wanted his
faces to be specific as well as generalized, to be able to combine the
particularity of a given sitter's features and expression while keeping that
cool, hieratic icon-like vacuity which is the hallmark of his portraiture. "An Arrow shirt ad translated into the
gravity of a Coptic funerary portrait" is the way Bill Berkson has
characterised this look which called for clean, rigorous graphic
precision.
Katz
also went from openness to closure for a technical reason that has to do with
his penchant for transparency, for sealing the image within the paint. He didn't like the way Matisses or Mondrians
age. "They had an idea of a
painting being immediate and left it as an open surface, I thought a Van Eyck surface looked
newer. It was closed and smooth. So I started making fatter grounds, trying
to make a closed surface."[5] Katz's transparency was still relative. Although he likes to talk about paint being
behind the image he deploys formal devices to slow down the viewer's gaze even
in his most sealed images of the 1970s, such as quirky drawing and mannerisms
of perspective. In the last decade,
however, there has been a radical renewal of open form painting. A sense of immediacy has been restored to
the paint where previously the material surface might seem lethargic. In his new paintings he has the best of both
worlds: the oils are succulent, rich, at times creamy but there is no
submission to impasto or to the inherent unmediated expressivity of the
material which would run counter to his need for control.
Katz
has observed how a painting can look open or closed while the experience of
making it can be opposite. The poet
Frank O'Hara, visiting his studio in 1954, detected an oriental calm in the
work, "which was interesting to me, because I thought of them as how I
painted them, wild and open."[6] This temperamental discrepancy between
process and result highlights something fundamental in Katz, a playoff between
control and improvisation. His
infatuation during his formative years with cool jazz, then his growing
affinity with New York School poetry (he has been written about by, and/or
painted the portraits of, many illustrious poets, among them John Ashbery,
Edwin Denby, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, as well as O'Hara and Berkson), and
later his collaboration with experimental dancers, all point to an interest in
tight structures within which fluid expression becomes possible.
His
modus operandi in his big pictures reconciles measure and freedom to a degree
perfectly suited to his artistic temperament.
Say he is painting a Maine landscape.
He makes an oil sketch in situ during his summer break. Back in New York - it could be months later
- he begins to work up the initial idea to its intended scale. The sketch is reconfigured as a drawing,
which is used like a traditional renaissance cartoon to transfer outlines to
the canvas (soot is pressed through countless perforation marks). Once the image reemerges on the canvas it is
more freely redrawn. Colors are
carefully mixed and laid out for the final assault. This will be the second bout of improvisation in the evolution of
the image, only where the initial sketch was perceptual the final painting,
built upon intervening phases of reduction and analysis, and reenacted in
isolation from the motif, is synthetic.
The painting is generally executed in one session, usually a heavy day's
labor, anything from five to eight hours.
Like the first sketch, the big painting is "wet in wet", but
the difference in scale intensifies the implications of working this way. With so much paint sliding around under his
brush there are countless risks and surprises, just like a live jamming
session. These virtuouso painterly performances,
so bright and cool and effortless at the end of the day, truly emulate the
jazzmen Katz lionized in his youth.
In
terms of reputation, Katz is Aesop's tortoise, for all that he paints with the
deft elegance of a hare. The hare, from
the point of view of the moral suggested by his career, could be played by any number
of artists who have conformed to the expectations of the contemporary artworld
by darting to an esthetic extreme - a reductive non plus ultra gambit which
defines them in relation to the prevailing discourse - in which they can then
rest, confident that they have made it big.
Katz has painted for many years "against the grain" but
without recourse to a beligerent traditionalism, content instead to be
(incongruous as it sounds) moderately avantgarde. Relative neglect has been the penalty for steering his middle way
between realism and abstraction, painterliness and reduction, stylishness and
emotional involvement, perception and synthesis.
He
has been denied certain trappings of major success - a place in the permanent
hang at the Museum of Modern Art, a seven figure record at auction - but the
consolation is that, precisely because he hasn't settled into being an
institution, Katz is now a beacon of hope to a diverse group of young artists
looking for a way out of painting's malaise.
Some of these are people who want to paint poignant images without
submitting to the tropes of narrative realism, to be personal without getting
lost in solipsism, to paint with "attitude" without tripping into a
neo-conceptualist anti-painting kind of painting. For such Americans as Elizabeth Peyton and Ena Swansea, and for
James Reilly, Peter Doig, Alessandro Raho, Merlin James, Alex Lowery and others
in England, Katz exemplifies knowing innocence. This may sound oxymoronic but young artists determined to renew
depictive painting are supremely conscious of a need to balance stylistic
awareness and expressive engagement. To
artists who see no contradiction in submerging ego into style and yet, through
style, constructing their own vision of the world, Alex Katz is worthy to be
called a master.
[1] Alex Katz Invented Symbols [edited by Vincent Katz] in the bi-lingual series Positionen zur Gegenwartskunst/Positions in Contemporary Art, Cantz 1997 p87
[2] Hilton Kramer "At 68, Alex Katz Blossoms With Ambitious New Show" in The New York Observer April 29, 1996
[3] David Sylvester [editor] Alex Katz Twenty Five Years of Painting from the Saatchi Collection, Saatchi Gallery, 1997 p73
[4] Invented Symbols p43
[5] Invented Symbols p78
[6] Invented Symbols p58