55. Near and Far: New monograph “Alex Katz”, reviewed by Master Raro
Our dear employer Louise has decided to include video facilities in the Ebersdorf Tower’s upcoming 33rd floor performance space. She has asked me to install cameras as well as studio lighting, sound, and editing equipment, in addition to setting up a small theater, with curtains, wings, and separate sound and lighting decks. She also suggests that I become the official videographer for the space, as well as stage manager for in-house live performances. Louise is convinced that Ivanka Trump will run for U.S. president in 2024, and our boss plans to join the resultant political campaign from what will be the new Ebersdorf Communications Center. Louise calls the floor itself “Ballet 33”.
To thank me for my efforts in setting up her command center, Louise has presented me with a new art volume for review for this internet site: Alex Katz (Rizzoli, 2020). I have always enjoyed this artist’s paintings and theater designs (especially his costumes and sets for the Paul Taylor repertory), so I have been living with the mammoth tome over the last two weeks. The volume is edited by Vincent Katz, the artist’s son. He claims that the examples of portraiture will allow the reader to obtain a glimpse of the artist as a social being, painting the people – friends, family, admired colleagues – who have accompanied him through life. There is indeed a preponderance here of Katz portraits, with a number of landscapes, cityscapes, and floral studies as well. Most of the paintings are oil on linen. Although the hundreds of illustrations do give us something of an overview, the pictorial effect of the original works must often be imagined since Katz likes to vary scale, and this includes many very large canvases.
Indeed, turning the pages of the volume, I was struck with the way the artist has been interested primarily in the distant and the close-at-hand for subject matter. There almost seems to me to be something Oriental about such choices. Katz is American born and bred, so what could account for his visual emphasis on near and far? What did it remind me of?
Then I recalled an analogue. When Louise was recently flirting with Chinese governmental powers over their expanded Silk Road project, she gave me a volume of ancient Chinese poetry to prepare myself, as she put it, for the possible “shock of dealing with a truly foreign culture”. The poems in that volume had what I called a “pull-focus” quality, sometimes forcing the reader to encounter a close detail, often shifting attention to a distant vista, and even combining the micro and macro fields in one scene. Here is a typical literary example (“Spirit Song” by Li Ho):
Sun sinks into western mountains, eastern mountains go dark.
Whirlwinds whip up horses, hooves pounding across clouds.
Painted ch’in, plain flute – to their tangle of thin-water sound,
a dance in autumn dust, flowered skirts rustling silk and sigh.
Cinnamon leaves brushing wind, cinnamon scattering seed.
Black-azure puma-cat weeping blood, fox dying a cold death,
an opalescent dragon on ancient walls, tail inscribed in gold,
then the rain god riding it down into a lake’s autumn waters,
and that ancient hundred-year-old owl – it’s a forest demon,
now: sound of laughter, emerald fire rising up out of its nest.
(The translation is by David Hinton. A “painted ch’in”, by the way, is a Chinese lute or zither.) As you can see, the poet’s eye moves from close-up to wide-angle shot, from hoof to cloud. I am not suggesting that our American contemporary Alex Katz had an antique Eastern connection or influence in mind while arriving at his visual aesthetic. But something like an optical contrast between detail and panorama allies his modern visual emphasis with the Chinese poet’s ability to command scale, to be both near- and far-sighted in his focus.
An underlying quality in the Chinese poet’s effects is called shih, an almost obsessional intensity of mental attention to the world’s sensuous data. The physical spectacle can be obdurate, seductive, even aggressive, but the poem allows us to experience lucidly the movement of the poet’s mind in gathering his evidence. There is a quasi-philosophical side to such Chinese art: an epistemological procedure is laid bare in the acquisition of his knowledge. We learn how the poet’s mind works under the impress of what he experiences immediately. I believe that something like this aesthetic reportage is at work in Katz’s visual oeuvre. In interviews, he has always stressed his interest in the immediate present. In the new Rizzoli volume, we can trace the forms such an emphasis has taken beneath his brush from the 1950s to the present. Katz is now in his 90s and very much at work. An essay in the Rizzoli book by Carter Ratcliff (“Among Contemporaries”) provides an art history context.
Since he chose early in his career a representational aesthetic, Katz’s images are as fascinating for what they leave out as for what they include. (I am influenced here by E. H. Gombrich’s concept of a “negative standard of vision”.) What is impressive is the way Katz disciplines the mid-distance in his scenes. In close-ups, we get the flash of an eye. In landscapes, we get a filigree of natural motifs. But, regularly, the mid-distance plane is empty, simplified or elided. In this way, Katz controls his cartoon so that it makes a direct, singular effect upon the viewer, who does not have to adjust his vision around any knotted density of detail in the mid-distance. (As one does, for example, in one of Rubens’ mythological scenes, with their roiling centers of action.) A Katz canvas can be movement-oriented, but its immediate force is often peripheral in origin, either moving laterally across the field of vision or emerging from an ambiguous center. The result is a mysterious calm since the image arrives from afar, often from beyond what the artist has caught within his chosen frame. Something is intuited off the edge or beyond the horizon of the scene. Perhaps the absence is a way of avoiding conventional “human interest” or some type of confessionalism. It may be analogous to Franz Kline’s anti-personalistic belief that to finish a canvas is “to pour yourself down the drain”.
The invited guests at the typical Katz portrait-party consist of multiple figures who turn their backs on our gaze or a face seen partially occluded over a shoulder. They are just as much a part of the pictorial interest as attendees incised in profile. And again and again there is Ada’s beautiful mane of hair and profile, including eventual signs of natural aging, as her hair is streaked with grey. The very preponderance of serial portraits of Katz’s muse-wife over much time is another way of showing that the pictorial subject eludes simple definition. The large scale of his paintings (Katz was impressed early in the 1950s by the heroic-sized works by Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning) indicates that a special approach must be used to catch the image in its original impulse and gestural impetus. What de Kooning called “the foremost plane” does not necessarily occur “downstage” here, but the intimacy of a close-up can suggest a privileged view. Katz’s cropping of his motifs may indicate how high artifice is required in certain optical situations. The famous Katz cutouts (small or life-sized representations of figures detached from a scenic context) become a way of avoiding their placement within a mid-distance ambience. Groups of figures (for example, multiple cocktail party attendees) arrange themselves across the facture in a frieze-like display, avoiding the pressure upon a central figure: everyone at this party is equal.
What I am pointing to is the general absence of the type of tableau that in filmmaking has been called the “plan américain” – a cinematographic mid-distance shot that shows figures full-length and with space around them for some movement or an eventual change in the permitted blocking. (My favorite examples are to be found in the silent comedies of Buster Keaton.) In his cutouts, Katz allows the viewer to construct an individual relation to the figure depending on proximity and the artwork’s size. We move around the figure. We change.
What is interesting is the degree to which Katz has achieved such “stylization” through a conscious exclusion of any centralized pictorial density that could connote impulse and consequence. He is wonderful at minutely characterized glancing portraiture. For example, each time we encounter Joe Brainard among the party guests, you know a great deal about the young man’s generosity and awkwardness. And the poet-critic Edwin Denby is caught smiling or listening attentively to the talent in the room. Much is said through the silhouette of the individual figure. And the artist’s control of color and light is masterly in all of the paintings and cutouts. The shift in reds in the lipstick chromatics for the women is a fascination.
In the large 1963 “Red Smile” the near-profiled view of Ada forces her facial features toward the exact center of the canvas, so that the woman’s profile holds the pressure as a sail contains a strong wind. The eyes have a slight inward, downturned focus, suggesting that the object of any immediate survey is mixed with introspection. Here is how Katz implies the interplay of perception and cognition. The viewer’s own eyes must move to take in the curving mouth, the convex head band, and the strand of hair literally blown back against the compositional thrust. The cartoon imposes such a parcours upon our survey. There is a counter-action in the lifted chin, alert forehead, and supporting collar of the white blouse. And all of this activity affronts the red background that takes up the left side of the portrait. Everything converges lightly around the half-seen smile, which confirms some active recognition that the figure of Ada endures here. In “Smile Again” (1964-1965), the same profiled arrangement enlarges eyebrow and nostril until the suggestion of a kind of mental hunger looms and the original details become surreal. Across his career, Katz has used such portraiture to explore a decentered project in his images.
In “City Landscape” (1995), the nocturnal street lights that we accept as background to our lives become strange orbs hanging in the distance beyond the bare winter trees of an urban park. The slim trunks look swathed in snowdrifts and dusted meagerly in distant lamplight. Trunks nearby are rendered with quick outlines, an exquisite realism in their proximity. But a row of mid-distance trees becomes spectral when spread across the canvas. That center cannot hold us. Ironically, the movement of vision in depth involves delicate tracery, insubstantial shadow, and artificial light. Such is the Katz cityscape.
Here and there in the Rizzoli collection there is, nevertheless, a residue of quasi-perspectival centering in Katz’s work. (I am aware that more examples may exist beyond this partial selection, so vast is this artist’s output.) In the early and middle 1950s, full-length figures float amid a colored field. The background competes with their presence so as to make them an extension of an evoked physical world. But in “10:00 am” and “Folding Chair” (both from 1959) the center of each picture gives its occupant something like a conventional scopic weight. In “10:00 am” Ada sits with erect back and with crossed legs amid a Matisse-like arrangement of interior geometry: window, wall picture, bed. She is smiling and looking past the painter and the viewer. Are we in the country? Something has caught her attention behind us. The urban folding chair’s legs are also crossed thanks to the diagonal on which it sits, awaiting its use by someone beyond the present picture’s frame.
There is a later outdoor scene with five figures on and around a rocky outcropping that has a Balthusian mixture of sightlines. It is titled “Ives Field 1” (1964). Its companion work, “Ives Field 2” (same year) reduces the natural vista while treating three of the same figures with magnification. But the center remains the young woman seated on the rock. She has moved out of the mid-distance into a close-up. (This second canvas has the feeling of cinematography in an Ingmar Bergman or Michaelangelo Antonioni movie.)
Another outdoor canvas (“The Ryan Sisters”, 1981) is a classic plan américain arrangement of four young girls with interlinked arms in a kind of “line routine” for the viewer. Katz captures their realistic effrontery and improvised self-presentation, recognizable in its group ambition toward pop ritual and a combination of female charms that clearly speaks to this painter. Another plein air arrangement from the same period, “Tracy on a Raft at 7:30” (1982) shows Katz’s skills at rendering the slim, adolescent female form. She turns her head toward us in profiled rest.
Perhaps youth is complexity enough for a painting’s center-stage. “Issac and Oliver” (2006) depicts Katz’s grandchildren as two male babes in the wood. Thus, the far-and-near stylization of the painter’s method can be contradicted under certain conditions. It bows before a tenderness of regard in this volume.
There is a sense in which Katz’s avoidance of the mid-distance in his pictures made him a perfect collaborator for Paul Taylor. The choreographer would fill and animate that central plane within the visual worlds Katz could imagine for the Taylor stage. Taylor’s dances are all central impulse and involute momentum. In the downstage screen for the Taylor-Katz Private Domain, you have a perfect example of the way Katz avoids conventional tableaux: we glimpse Taylor’s lurid paperback-cover images through the Katz apertures. In Sunset, the fence on stage right ultimately funnels the dance action along a diagonal. We know that the soldiers will be forced toward a future battleground because the dancing space – an urban park -- is deliberately limited, perhaps a metaphor for time running out in spatial terms. For Diggity, Katz designed life-size canine cutouts to provide literal obstacles for the dancers. The dancers come and go, but the dogs remain. At this time on YouTube, you can catch an early performance of Scudorama, with its beach towels designed to look like American Indian blankets. (The scudding clouds on the backdrop are difficult to make out in the film.) The costumes for the Tourist and his Doppelganger are perfect Alex Katz inspirations: itchy and menacing.
Edwin Denby took Katz to many dance concerts over the seasons and introduced him to Paul Taylor as a potential scenic and costume designer. As I began with a poem, let me finish with Denby’s “Alex Katz paints his north window”:
Alex Katz paints his north window A bed and across the street, glare City day that I within know Like wide as high and near as far New York School friends, you paint glory Itself crowding closer further Lose you marbles making it What’s in a name – it regathers From within, a painting’s silence Resplendent, the silent roommate Watch him, not a pet, long listen Before glory, the stone heartbeat When he’s painted himself out of it De Kooning says his picture’s finished.
M.R.
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