This morning I found Alex Katz in a very unusual place: my J. Crew catalogue, which faithfully arrived with its usual thud in today's mail. I'm much more used to seeing Katz at American Art or in the countless collections that show his work. But now Katz is celebrated by J. Crew as a "Great American Artist" with still-life details of his studio, paintings of his wife, Ada, and three full-page portraits of the man himself in the catalogue.
At American Art there are several works by Katz, including the beautiful portrait of Ada, Black Scarf, from 1995. In addition, the museum has Katz's painted cut-out series, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which Katz created as stage sets for Kenneth Koch's play of the same name. Katz was born in New York in 1927 and came to prominence there during the 1950s and 1960s, creating large, colorful canvases that were of the time but seemed to be anchored with more classical ballast.
In the catalogue, I like seeing the inside of his studio and the images of well-squeezed tubes of paint. What worries me, however, is the pair of Crew white chino pants Katz wears on page 129. Living with a painter who is working in the next room even as I write, I know those white pants don't stand a chance.
Want to learn more about Alex Katz? Check out our video interview with him.
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An interview with the artist Alex Katz. Alex Katz's paintings and sculptures monumentalize common moments of everyday life. Katz was influenced by the golden age of the billboard business. Roadside signs with moving parts, in which the figures extended beyond the billboard, also motivated Katz to produce canvas cutouts pasted onto wooden boards, fashioning life-size figures that are like huge paper dolls. (Marshall, Alex Katz, 1986)
ALEX KATZ: I had a show of cut-outs, and Kenneth Coltin said, “I have a play that’s going to be produced. It was an off-Broadway thing on 42nd Street. Would you like to do cut-outs for the play?” That’s the way it started. So, there were real people and cut-out people on the boat, there were real soldiers and fake soldiers, et cetera. I wanted the energy to spread past the edges, so they didn’t look like cut-out photographs. The brushwork was very open. It was like, human beings have energy that passes past the edges. The process – I think I drew and painted them at once, and then cut them out after they were painted. That was the process. It was really simple.
If you extend yourself and make something that’s basically new, you have no way of knowing whether it makes sense to anyone, until you show it to them.
I painted this two days ago, and it was five hours of painting, if you can believe it. I like it fast, because the surface gets so smooth. There was a coat of yellow on the whole painting, so the color on your brush is darker when you first put it on, and as you pull it through the paint it becomes lighter. Everything is put into wet paint, and you get a lot of different tones. And you get a very smooth surface. Very few large paintings have that kind of smoothness to them. That landscape, I had no idea where that painting was when I finished it. I never did anything quite like that. I had an idea in my head of what I wanted, and it didn’t quite correlate to what I had in my head. So, people started looking at it, and they all had very strong positive reactions, and now I’m getting to like it.
I grew up in a provincial modern art school, Cooper Union. They were teaching Cubism, so Picasso was king. Picasso and Matisse. You couldn’t beat them at what they did. It was like, let’s go into something different.
I wanted a painting you could put next to a Kline or de Kooning and really give it a bounce. And when I got to these big heads, they did it. A little painting of mine next to someone else’s painting, it would usually destroy it. The visual power – and I use very prosaic imagery, flowers, pretty girls – you want to burn the image in someone’s head. My way is really aggressive – it’s very aggressive, they're really aggressive paintings.
Sir Isaac Julien’s moving image installation "Lessons of the Hour" interweaves period reenactments across five screens to create a vivid picture of nineteenth-century activist, writer, orator, and philosopher Frederick Douglass.
