Jackie wullschlager alex katz biography
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Alex Katz: the ‘artist of the immediate’ on why his time is now
“Painting is going very well. And outside of that, it’s all pretty crappy,” says Alex Katz, over the phone from New York. The indefatigable 93-year-old artist has just released a new book with Rizzoli, another monograph. This one is larger and fuller than previous publications – there are more than 250 paintings, alongside photographs, sketches and ephemera; works by other artists, which give insight into Katz’s process and ethos; and an enjoyably thorough essay by the art critic Carter Ratcliff.
The book is square and enormous. This heft suits Katz’s current mood as he focuses – sometimes angrily, sometimes humorously – on declaring that he is a brilliant painter who has been underappreciated and largely misunderstood. It’s true that Katz, while popular in Europe – “people wait outside my hotel for autographs” – and liked by the young, is not so adored in his home city of New York, where he has not had a major sur
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Time Is On His Side • Alex Katz and Etel Adnan at London’s Serpentine Gallery
by Jackie Wullschlager
American painting is about surface, European painting is about depth. Pioneering postwar figures – Pollock and Warhol, Bacon and Freud – confirmed the truth of that cliché. But the two most interesting American painters of the end of the 20th century, who survived into the 21st to make radical, exhilarating late work, each built a unique oeuvre by collapsing that difference.
Both Cy Twombly, who died last year aged 83, and 84-year-old Alex Katz, whose new show at Tate St Ives in south-west England includes daring, monumental paintings made between 2007 and 2011, combine the language of American abstraction with a European inflection: in Twombly’s case the influence of history, myth, lyric poetry, in Katz’s the impulse of plein air painting of light and sea, and an engagement with society at play, alluding to Monet, Bonnard and Matisse.
Superbly installed in bright, sea-facing galleries, A
by Wullschlager, Jackie
Alex Katz says his subjects are “quick things passing”. For nearly seven decades, this great American painter has stylised the human figure and landscape into big, bright, clean billboard-like compositions that both imitate how we see, and arrest a fleeting moment of time. An exhibition of new and recent work, Alex Katz, Quick Light, launched this week at London’s Serpentine galleri, includes some of the most memorable works he has ever made, and confirms him as the most persuasive, honest and joyful figurative painter alive.
In the opening galleri, we confront, in just the way the face of a person before us fills our field of framtidsperspektiv, a strong, familiar kontur. High cheekbones, Roman nose, watchful eyes are outlined in a few careful yet livlig contours on to a patch of skin tones, offset bygd a svep of grey hair, caressed by a warm apelsinfärg monochrome backdrop. Frontal light eliminates detail and