by Joan K. Yanni
Alex Katz, creator of
the newly-installed Twilight is a unique, unorthodox painter of modern
life. His subjects—always familiar, usually affluent—drink at a party,
smoke, sunbathes, dine. They wear casual, elegant clothes. Yet Katz
makes them somehow different. His outwardly placid images are caught in a
specific instant in time, in the middle of a gesture. His pictures are
flattened, angular; often strange, unstated undercurrents are caught on stiff,
smooth faces. Katz desires to jar and surprise the viewer by presenting
the ordinary or mundane in a major way: ultra large scale, simplified
forms in painted-out backgrounds give his work maximum visual impact.
Katz was born in 1927 in
Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. He attended Cooper Union Art School, The
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, and studied with Henry
Varnum Poore. He first attempted large, cropped images when influenced by
Kline and deKooning.
He works quickly, to
achieve smooth canvases with casual strokes that disappear into a crisp,
impersonal precision. He became well known in the 1950s art scene, and
his pictures have held up well. In 1987; last year the Whitney held a
Katz retrospective.
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A series of serigraph
prints by Katz was donated to the Gallery by Lewis Norry and his wife Jill Katz
Norry (no, she is not related to the artist!) in 1995. The serigraphs,
titled Alex and Ada Suite, (the 1960s to the 1980s) are all portraits of Katz and his wife done in the artist’s
unique, simplified style. They are larger than life, impersonal and without
background. Their size and close croppings demand a second—and third—look.(April 1996)
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