At first, the prospect of an Alex Katz retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum did not put my mind at ease. Katz’s paintings include canvases of billboard-sized heads and towering trees, patched with strikingly bright colors or covered in layers of shadow.
The bays that divide the Guggenheim’s large spiral lamps are small, low-ceilinged, and sloping. The structure was designed to showcase understated, abstract easel painting, the pinnacle of early European modernism. Unsurprisingly, this place is unknown in the survey of American figurative painters.
But there was no need to worry. “Alex Katz: The Gathering” The museum, which opens on Friday, is an example of art and architecture alike coming together for the occasion. Katz’s accomplishments are more than surviving in this setting. it thrives. In doing so, it provides further evidence of the evolving diversity of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spacecraft.
The show’s 154 artworks — including about 79 small collages, oil paintings, prints, drawings, and painted aluminum figurative cutouts on 75 large canvases — are curated by curator Catherine Carefully selected and installed by Brinson to maximize Spiral’s capabilities. Best: Simple chronology tells an increasingly revelatory story. It shows how talent, determination and individual sensibility can shape great art and sustain its momentum over time. This is what a retrospective should do, and Katz’s work does this very clearly, almost transparently. It should give hope to everyone, especially artists.
As the title goes, “collecting” may sound corny at first, but it applies broadly and intricately. It suggests one of Katz’s primary subjects, perhaps one of his, the gathering of light (or twilight or night). It also suggests a social gathering of people drawn from the circle of painters, poets and dancers with whom he was closest, whom he has often depicted.Married in 1959.
Then there is the collection of drawings and oil paintings in which Katz plots large paintings on linen to achieve a sense of the spontaneity of small paintings all at once. And don’t forget that the Guggenheim is currently collecting Katz’s work. This is a full-time exhibition of nearly 80 years of his paintings.
Katz, 95, is one of the most idiosyncratic painters in the American art world and a follower of the post-war New York School of Painting, but he also works with Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism and Colorfield. Nevertheless, he absorbed all those aspects, sometimes before they even formed. He’s a loner, never part of Castelli’s gallery crowd, Jasper he’s like Johns, Andy Warhol, Frank he’s Stella, high auction prices, solid art history niches, fawn followers So anointed art was not even his star.
Art/exhibition special corner
The show winds up a ramp like a movie, with each bay acting as a frame or two, tracing the development of one of the longest and most productive careers in American art.
One of the earliest works on display is a portrait of the artist’s mother, actress Sima Katz. Its title, Ella Marion in a Red Sweater, evokes the stage name she used as the Russian-born star of the Yiddish Theatre. He painted this painting in his 1946, Cooper when he was 19 when he had just started studying at Union. As you ascend the spiral into the present, so does the picture. As the show culminates in the museum’s top floor ramps and high-ceilinged towers in her gallery, the scale expands, the colors brighten, and Katz turns more and more to nature. Katz’s recent landscapes dominate, translating combinations of sky, trees, buildings, water, grass, or pavement (and always bright) into ecstatic moments of perception and awareness. That is, the joy of seeing, seeing and knowing. These final paintings are all abstract, giving the show’s finale a certain head-turning and movement, as if the atrium’s rose window skylights were simply lifted and floating.
Katz was born in Brooklyn in 1927 and grew up in St. Albans, Queens in a bohemian family. His mother was an avid reader of poetry. His father, also Russian-born and active in theater, was “well-educated but never flashy,” writes Katz. “Invented Symbols” his 2012 “art autobiography”. He started painting with his father and grew up knowing his family was different. For one thing, all of them, especially his father, frequently repainted and repainted rooms in their homes in unusual colors. In his memoirs, Katz remembers a pink sunroom punctuated by small dark red triangles. But at some point it became excessive. Katz painted his bedroom in beige with brown trim. “I was trying to do something normal,” he wrote. “Everything in our house was so strange.”
The show reveals that most of the building blocks of Katz’s mature work were revealed early on. A process inspired by the art and artists he met during his life in New York. A 1946 portrait of his mother — her hand on her chin, her horizontal gaze, the sweater, the table, the geometric patterns in the background — is what Katz has been waiting for. A sketch of a subway passenger from a notebook from this period proves that his knowledge of the person was already perfected.
In the late 1940s, Katz had two transformative experiences. He fell in love with the lights of Maine during his two summers at the Scouggan School of Painting and Sculpture and soon began spending each summer in the coastal town of Lincolnville. And when confronted with the paintings of Jackson Pollock, he was inspired by their scale, direct execution, overall energy and materiality. However, he never joined the Abstract Expressionist bandwagon.
He wanted to paint representationally in a modern way, open to the slick aesthetics of movies, billboards and the latest fashion…if you follow her at a cocktail party. As he wrote in his autobiography, his main concern was “the experiential sense, the painting of the outside world.” I still couldn’t figure out how to do it. I wanted to incorporate that into contemporary art. ”
he will find his way. He alluded to Pollock’s systemicity in The Apple Tree (1954), in the color of the trunk and branches and the fill of the scratched lines. In 1955, and in the years that followed, Katz went smaller and confronted the enormity and flatness of Abstract Expressionist painting with a series of small collages on watercolor and colored paper depicting the fields and coastline of Maine. Their distant horizons, vast skies, and isolated signs of human activity still feel amazingly radical. Brinson quotes Katz telling an interviewer that collage “was the first time he knew he was making art.”
The authenticity and economy of these collages, such as “Untitled (At the Seashore),” are Katz’s trademarks. They are from 1958 to his 1963, like ‘Paul Taylor’, the first portraits of family and friends standing or sitting alone or as a couple against a flat, sober background isolated. generate. They create more complex landscapes, including the mysterious Munchang-style ‘Luna Park’ of 1960. They inspire more sophisticated, sharply rendered combinations of figures and ground like ‘The Red Smile’. And, like 1969’s “Vincent and Tony,” it provides the backdrop for much of the main picture.
The middle section of the show, filled with many fine paintings, covers a similar backdrop to the 1986 Katz retrospective at Whitney. Then he felt the need for something else and began concentrating on the main landscape and the New York City skyline (light, weather), making the surface of the paint faster and looser, like in the 1950s, and physics in dots. I was shocked by the outstanding prominence.
The audacious consequences of these decisions fill the museum’s highest levels, pushing the boundaries of both painting and expression, challenging us to make sense of them and see what Katz saw. The “trees” are flashy, glowing with orange and turquoise and seemingly without any spatial logic. “Blue Tree 2” looks very realistic at first, until you realize that its rough, tanned trunk is little more than a shell of broad, lightweight brushstrokes. is. A huge black figure — a hillside covered in trees? — emerges from the deepest blue.
In “Fog”, large, thick pale greyish-gray lozenges look like oversized leaves and pine branches. And in the wonderful “Black Brook 16”, about 30 feet long, horizontal and vertical globs of paint in several shades of dark green and gray, from reflection to top to bottom, large to small, from reflection to It is impossible to distinguish between solids.
There are few portraits here, but the most notable is one of Ada Katz, seen from behind, with streaked gray and white hair. These paintings that emphasize death may seem tragic, but they are a source of joy.
Alex Katz: The GatheringOctober 21-February 20, 2023, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Ave, Manhattan, (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org.