Alex Katz Makes Painting Look Easy at the Guggenheim

Relegating his subject matter to landscapes, still lifes, and interiors, as well as to portraiture, Katz is basically a genre painter, a tradition that found its fullest expression in 17th-century Holland. Indeed, his oversize likenesses are part of a continuum going back to the “tronie” (translatable to face) of Golden-Age Dutch art. Tronies weren’t formal portraits of known persons, but rather studies of the outward expressions—sometimes exaggerated—of anonymous individuals. Katz’s work differs, of course, not only because of their scale, or because his sitters are usually friends or family members, but also because the emotional range of his subjects is limited.

Although lips—pursed or slightly open in tight smiles—play a part in registering feeling, Katz relies mainly on the eyes, those windows onto which the soul opens here through slight shifts in position, or glints of light. In Blue Umbrella 2 (1972), for instance, Katz’s favorite model and muse—his wife Ada—wears a gaily-colored kerchief as she shelters herself from the pelting rain under a cerulean parapluie. Three dots of white forming a line across each of her irises are all it takes to conjure the impression that Ada is also taking refuge in a daydream.

Overall, Katz renders his portraits in flattened colors, with features sketched in by subdued brushwork. His subjects always seem to be at a cryptic remove, as if they were projections on a screen. In fact, Katz was inspired by movies and billboards, putting him in the company of Pop artists such as Warhol and James Rosenquist, although Katz’s approach has remained more apparitional than appropriative. Before he attained his signature style, Katz labored through clunkier vistas of figures and countryside that owed a debt to artists Milton Avery and Fairfield Porter. In time, Katz monumentalized his figures and began to steer his landscapes (mainly of the woods around his summer home in Maine), toward near abstraction. In one scene on view from 1992, the sun glints off a lake and resolves into a central, ectoplasmic blob that nearly swallows the composition whole in an ecstatic act of obliteration.

Discordant notes often intrude upon Katz’s vision of the sublime. In a painting from 1967 of Ted Berrigan, the poet wears a worried look, which is perhaps meant to reflect some generalized, Cold War-era anxiety, but still seems out of character for an artist once derided by a critic as a “high-level society painter.

An analogous rap on Katz—that his work is too redolent of White, especially WASP, privilege—might offer an explanation. Katz is Jewish, which, as his friend, the African American artist Arthur Jafa argues in the exhibition catalog, places him in a lineage of “Jewish artists rendering whiteness.” Speaking as a filmmaker, Jafa is referring specifically to Jewish pioneers of Hollywood—Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, and Samuel Goldwyn—who offered a homogenized, and very gentile, view of life in their films.

Jafa’s point speaks to a larger impulse throughout Judaism’s history of assimilating and blending in with surrounding communities at the expense of the visible signifiers (yarmulkes, sidelocks) of faith. Yet assimilation is hardly a shield against antisemitism, whether in Germany during the 1930s, or even at this moment.

However, it would be a stretch to say Katz's work deals with such issues, though a 1962-63 self-portrait of the artist glowering from under a black trilby is suggestively titled Passing. Ultimately, it's fairer to say that as an artist, Katz is an outsider wearing the mask of an insider whose work takes an aspirational shortcut to a promised land where the sharp edges of fitting in are sanded down by elegance.