Alex Katz
Alex Katz
b. 1927
The works of Alex Katz are characterized by monochrome background, large areas of flat colours and minimalistic imagery. Born in New York in 1927, Katz came of age at the height of Abstract Expressionism, his paintings conjoining realism and observation of everyday life to a personal, emotional aesthetic. In the late 1950s he began producing portraits, an interest that he cultivated throughout his career. Inspired by the world of TV and advertisement, in the 1960s he started creating large scale canvases which evolved, in the following decades, into his famed ‘environmental’ paintings. These monumental landscapes transport viewers into alternate realities, which seem to expand beyond the edges of the canvas. Still an active artist today, Katz created paintings and prints which convey his unique aesthetic of emotive realism.
Alex Katz’s intriguing portraits and landscapes are windows into his own reality. His works are characterised by his monochrome backgrounds, flattened pictorial space, large swaths of colour, bare bones imagery and a sense of presence. Coming of age in New York at the height of Abstract Expressionism, Katz’s direct and enveloping works establish an unprecedented approach to realism that joins flatness with the energy and movement derived from masters like Jackson Pollock.
Katz was born in 1927 in Brooklyn to parents who shared with him their love for poetry and the arts. He spring boarded from his youth art classes to the Cooper Union Art School in 1946 where he was trained in contemporary art and painting from drawings. Katz’s studies at the Cooper Union were counterbalanced by those at the provincial Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine where he studied for two summers. Skowhegan promoted painting from life and en plein air, practices that continue to be fundamental to Katz’s work.
Skowhegan introduced Katz to realism, yet he believed that this realism was foreign, reflective of someone else’s reality. He argues that reality is not universal but conditioned by the individual experience, effectively making ‘realism’ an aesthetic that is not universal but personal. In the late 1950s, Katz began searching for a greater realism through portraiture, using his friends and his wife Ada, his lifelong muse, as his subjects. Works such as ‘Ada’ (1959) portray his early concise renditions of his sitters against solid backdrops, an aesthetic that he carries across his oeuvre.
From the early 1960s Katz began producing large scale paintings, drawing influence from the monumental canvases of the Abstract Expressionists as well as film, TV and billboards. He continued to produce isolated portraits, the faces of which, despite the wealth of canvas space, he dramatically cropped to bring the sitters into a more intimate relationship with the viewer.
In the late 1980s and ‘90s, Katz produced large landscapes, which he called ‘environmental’ paintings. The scale of these landscapes recalls stage sets, tools that transport the viewer into new dimensions. This was precisely Katz’s aim, to invite viewers into the field of vison presented by these canvases and allow themselves to be enveloped. This aesthetic was influenced by Pollock, whose dynamic splatters physically implied a world that is not confined to the edges of the canvas.
Each of Katz’s compositions are carefully drawn out, refined and then distilled down into an uncomplicated image. This incredibly systematic and disciplined preparation ironically allows Katz to paint the final composition with little restraint. With his plans in mind, Katz rapidly translates the composition into a painting, reaching across his massive canvases to spontaneously paint the details in pursuit of what he terms the ‘present tense’. This aesthetic can be perceived in the fluidity and momentary nature of the leaves from ‘10:30am’ (2006).
Katz continues to work seven days a week, producing massive canvases and captivating prints from his studios in New York and Maine. Across his life, Katz has developed an aesthetic that is largely indebted to his two places of study. From the emotive and physical strokes he learned from the Abstract Expressionists to the quiet and precise studies from life in Maine, Katz has synthesised a uniquely 20th century aesthetic of realism.
SELF-PORTRAITS
Alex Katz
Alex Katz is perhaps best known for his celebrated portraits of isolated subjects against vast monochrome backdrops. Of his best-known sitters is the artist himself whose suave self-portraits are testaments to his skilfulness in manipulating colour, scale and composition to produce distinctly cinematic, yet psychologically blunt works.
Katz’s self-portraits are largely rendered as close-ups reminiscent of film stills, as if he has just zoomed in on a specific moment in time. Too, they exude the influence of billboard advertising as not only are they typically large in scale, but they are unabashedly two-dimensional, their smooth surfaces flattening the picture plane.
Such influences are echoed in Katz’s dress. While in ‘Self-Portrait’ (1978) he depicts himself as a tanned Hollywood actor with bright white teeth, in ‘Passing’ (1962-63) he is a businessman. This dominantly black, white and grey work shows Katz dressed in a suit with a top hat, his likeness characteristically simplified, the volume of his body revealed through the clarity of colour contrasts. Katz looks out at the viewer directly with neither a smile nor a frown, composing a self-portrait that critics interpret as also a portrait of the everyday man.
The indistinguishable sentimentality of ‘Passing’ is true across Katz’s self-portraits, the artist having articulated that his aim was to create a self-portrait ‘that was not narcissistic, that was not soulful or sentimental, not maudlin’. While self-portraits often hint at an artist’s self-perception, Katz’s adamantly do not, depriving viewers of psychological insights and biographical narratives. Instead, Katz’s preoccupation was with technical issues, his self-portraits acting as a subject through which he can experiment with form: ‘Style and appearance are the things I’m more concerned about than what something means. I’d like to have style take the place of content…I prefer it to be empty of meaning, empty of content’.
PORTRAITS
Alex Katz
Iconic of Alex Katz’s oeuvre are his dramatic, cinematic portraits, begun in the 1950s. Against vast expanses of typically popping colour, Katz depicts his sitters, usually friends or family members. Through his characteristic reductive and flattened style, his portraits convey a new form of abstraction.
Katz’s portraits, particularly his ‘Big Faces’, are influenced by the logic of film, TV and billboards. Since the 1960s, he has dramatically cropped his portraits, bringing his sitters closer to the viewer, a choice that, when combined with his widescreen format, recalls film close ups. A cinematic technique to hone in on a character’s emotion, the film close up in Katz’s portraits achieves the opposite, frustrating any psychological reading with his sitters’ flattened smiles.
The sitters are rendered in a reductive style, only their most crucial features captured unabashedly two-dimensionally. Paired down to their essentials, the logic of Katz’s figures recall Minimalism as, too, do his vast monochrome backdrops.
While Katz paints a range of sitters, from Anna Wintour to his son Vincent, his longest and most reoccurring subject is his wife, Ada. Since they met in 1957, Katz has painted Ada, capturing the process of her aging across over 250 works. Speaking of Ada, Katz notes ‘she’s both a European beauty and an American beauty. She’s like Dora Maar, the same kind of face, but then her smile is the American-beauty smile’.
Regardless of his sitter, Katz notes ‘most of the people I paint are cast into roles and I’m the director’. Yet, set against a monochrome backdrop and offering no context other than the sitters’ clothes and facial expressions, their roles and narratives become frustrated. ‘I’m trying to paint the now. And narrative is a story, and once you get into the story it’s no longer in the real present tense’.
LANDSCAPES
Alex Katz
Emerging in the art world in New York at the height of the Abstract Expressionists, a summer programme at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine exposed Alex Katz to the world of realism. A distinct contrast from the concrete jungle of Manhattan, Katz was in and amongst the captivating landscapes of Maine, painting en plein air to produce, since 1949, enveloping and transportive landscapes.
While landscape painting has existed throughout his career, Katz was particularly focused on it in the late 1980s and ‘90s with his environmental paintings. Named for their enveloping nature, these landscapes are monumental in scale and are works of open, all-over compositions. That is, they give the allusion of stretching beyond the space of the canvases, acting almost as theatre sets which allow the viewer before them to become a player in Katz’s created world.
In 1986, Katz began producing night paintings, cityscapes, blackened building, seascapes and forests which capture a new form of light. Regardless of the time of day, Katz’s aesthetic is to capture what he calls the ‘present tense’. Rooted in abstraction, the present tense is a way of capturing an instant moment of perception, the flicker of an image before it comes into focus. Effectively, Katz’s realist landscapes with their careful considerations of light nonetheless have an abstract sensibility.
Katz splits his time between his two homes in New York and Maine where he continues to produce his monumental landscape paintings. From the time he was a student at Skowhegan, Katz has been captivated by the light in Maine, speaking of the coalescence of light, colour and movement of the landscape as provoking a form of unconscious painting. It is as if his plein air landscapes are his responses to the nature that surrounds him.
FLOWERS
Alex Katz
‘They have an image and they can’t stop, you keep moving on them’, said Alex Katz of his painting and prints of flowers. Petunias, roses, lilies, tulips, marigolds and many more are rendered in Katz’s characteristic expressive realism, their forms reduced to their bare essentials. Dominating the visual field of Katz’s flower works, these static forms nonetheless skilfully imply movement.
While the subject of flowers recalls the legacy of still life painting, and although Katz often plucked flowers to paint in his studio, his flower works are anything but still life. He does not capture movement obviously; these flowers do not bend in the wind, their petals do not fall. Instead, their movements are implied, the focus directed onto the budding flower which the viewer anticipates to bloom.
Katz’s work on flowers, which, in some ways, is a continuation of his celebrated series of landscapes, emerged in the 1960s out of a frustrated attempt at capturing movement. In 1965, Katz produced ‘Cocktail Party’ and ‘Lawn Party’, unrelated paintings of figure groups socialising. Despite this implication of a photographic snapshot, Katz found himself frustrated with his figures’ lack of movement. Resultingly, he reconciled this issue while at his home in Maine, surrounded by wildflowers, the subjects of his flower paintings which he continues to produce today.
Like his portraits, Katz’s flowers can be found as individual compositions which are cropped and flattened, recollective of the logic of Japanese art, or grouped in small clusters. Set against Katz’s characteristic monochrome backdrops, these variously coloured flowers are situated in endlessly vast and aesthetically breath-taking environments.
BLACK DRESS
Alex Katz
In 2015, Alex Katz initiated his ‘Black Dress’ series, a range of nine paintings on door panels that depict his friends all clad in their own version of the ‘little black dress’. Building on his 1960 painting ‘The Black Dress’ of his wife Ada clad in an understated black dress, Katz has produced paintings, prints and cut out sculptures which, in focusing on subtle differences of an iconic fashion trend, seek to extract individuality.
The little black dress is a fashion statement that designers continue to look to for inspiration, innovating and reinventing the concise, basic but nonetheless chic clothing item. Katz, too, reinvents his version of Ada’s dress in his ‘Black Dress’ works, narrow panels set against a monochrome yellow backdrop. Katz’s female friends were instructed to wear a version of their choosing of the little black dress as well as the accompanying footwear.
The series as a whole at first glance appears to be repetitive as each woman relaxes against the panel’s left side, her shoulder touching the edge, her left arm resting across her waist while her right forearm raises from her waist. Initially, one panel distinguished from the next by hair colour but they quickly become nuanced in the different variations of their clothing, from scooping necks to turtle necks, thin straps to capped sleeves, subtle but nonetheless telling of their individual personas.
Speaking of Katz’s ‘Black Dress’ works, Calvin Klein said he loves ‘what a simple black dress says about the woman who wears it’. Against monochrome backdrops with no individualised body language, Katz proves just this point as the narrative and personalities of his friends read through their version of the simple little black dress.
