Alex Katz
"Alex Katz:
Flowers & Landscapes" at PaceWildenstein until November 8 (32
E 57th Street, at Madison Avenue, 212 421 3292).
"Alex Katz:
Cartoon" at Peter Blum until November 15 (99 Wooster Street, between
Prince and Spring Streets, 212 343 0441).
By JOE FYFE
Alex Katz Aqua
Sweatshirt 1983
graphite and charcoal on paper, 69-7/8 x 49-3/4 inches
courtesy Peter Blum, New York
The painter Alex Katz, now
50 years into his career, is a kind of artist that only comes along
every hundred years or so. He's in a line with the 18th Century's Francois
Boucher and the 19th Century's Claude Renoir, artists who are authoritative
painters within a world view that they established early in their careers.
Theirs is a distinctive, sensual world that deftly apotheosizes what
is considered "gracious living" by the dominant class of the
period. Boucher's art centered itself around the boudoir fantasies of
the nobility. Renoir updated some of Boucher's themes, but reflected
the rise of the bourgeois, producing many picnics and maternal domestic
scenes among his abundant paintings of nudes.
Katz concentrates mainly
on images of what New Yorkers are or aspires to be: attractive, quasi-bohemian
materialists. Katz paints us in our urban milieu or out of town in verdant
summertime scenes. Like his predecessors, Katz is a tough-minded poet
and consummate professional with an intellectual energy that rivals
the stamina of an athlete. Like them, he continues to find interesting
problems in his chosen project. There is continuity in the high quality
of the work.
Katz's landscapes are sometimes
unpopulated. In Alex Katz: Flowers and Landscapes a dozen of these very
large paintings are on exhibition at Pace Wildenstein gallery uptown.
In the painting "Roses on Blue" the odd red shapes of the
flowers rush at you like punchy kisses. Katz has an inimitable New York
aplomb that couples brute elegance with surprising sweetness. His surfaces
are just brushy enough that the paint has a presence, a physical forthrightness
that supports the slight, everyday aspect of the imagery. This attachment
to the moment as it passes touches on another unique aspect of this
artist: though a straight man, he had no bones about adapting the casual,
offhand sensibility of the primarily gay New York School of poets. This
was in the fifties, a time when the dominant painting ethos was myth-mongering
and macho.
Downtown at Peter Blum gallery an incidentally simultaneous exhibition
of Alex Katz: Cartoons, drawings that were used to transfer an image
to canvas, contain much of interest as well. Here, in a group of works
never intended for exhibition, (Katz says he found them under his bed)
the artist looks like an old master. The sepia-toned dustings surrounding
the linear figuration hearken back to Boucher's charcoal and red-penciled
drawings, a show of which, also incidentally just opened at the Frick.
read
a review of these same shows by David Cohen
JOE FYFE is contributing editor to artcritical. As a painter, he
represented by JG Contemporary Art in NYC. He also writes regularly
for Art in America, Art on Paper, and Bomb.
Also by Joe Fyfe: Thomas
Nozkowski Drawings, George Peck and Anita
Brookner
