Art & Artists

Art Beat Alex Katz Paints Ada
Art Round-Up Abstract Artist Featured at the Met
Art Meets Athleticism

Art Beat
Alex Katz Paints Ada

– By Mary Brennan Gerster –

Imagine that your spouse is an artist and you are the subject of most of his/her paintings. Not just small, unobtrusive canvasses, but large four-foot and six-foot works, and your face fills the majority of the space. This is the reality of Ada Katz, wife and muse of artist Alex Katz. The Jewish Museum has selected 40 Ada paintings for a unique look at how a single subject can inspire an artist.

Katz began painting Ada in 1957, the year before they were married, and continues today. These works range from loose, painterly, primitive images such as Red Blouse (1961) and View (1962) to the slick almost Pop Red Coat (1982) and Ada (2005), where gray streaks on her hair point to the passing of time.

The painting of portraits is as old as the history of art. During the Renaissance patrons had themselves painted into commissioned religious pieces. When the Academies ruled portraiture was second only to historical painting in acceptability for inclusion in exhibitions. Before the advent of photography it was a way to guarantee remembrance. It has also always provided a means to make a living for many artists. Today, we have pet and house portraits as well.

We are still drawn into Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Van Gogh's Dr. Gachet and all of Rembrandt's portraits. The facts of the sitter may be long forgotten, but the intrigue remains alive, a testimony to the power of the hand of the artist.

John Singer Sargent brought us glamour and Picasso the many women in his life. Alice Neel, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud remove all the accoutrements and create unflinching, raw portraits. Chuck Close's graphic grids of friends and family are exacting and unemotional. There are as many styles of portraiture as there are individuals to portray.

Alex Katz has created his own instantly recognizable style of painting. His large, flat planes of color and scaled-down detailed figures and landscape are at once inviting and distant. We would recognize Ada if we caught a glimpse of her on the street and yet it is only the exterior Ada we know. She is a wife, a mother, a friend, she is fashionable, beautiful. Elegant and comfortable with whom she is. We glean these facts from the many images of her created by her husband. Despite the streaks of gray in the most recent paintings she seems almost ageless. Artists paint that with which they are familiar and Ada as Katz's wife is certainly that.

Katz was born in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn in 1927. His mother was an actress who worked on the Jewish stage in the U.S after studying in Odessa. He went to Woodrow Wilson Vocational School looking towards a career in commercial art. After the Navy he spent three years at Cooper Union graduating in 1949 just as Abstract Expressionism was exploding onto the New York art scene.

Though aware of and influenced by Pollock, DeKooning and Kline, Katz remained with figurative painting, bucking the powerful trend for abstraction. He showed at the Tanager Gallery with like-minded artists Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter and Larry Rivers. The post-war American art moved from Abstraction to Pop to Minimalism to Conceptual. Throughout these explosive changes Katz stayed the course with his own form of realism.

At first glance one may think of Pop icons Warhol and James Rosenquist, but Katz's art doesn't have their billboard commercialism. His work is more abstract than the photo realists and more personal than John Currin's portraits. He is more akin to fellow painters Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilicher, though his technique is a less painterly.

Katz has said, “All paintings belong to the paintings before them.” He attributes a 1940's exhibition of Bonnard's at MoMA as having heavily impacted his work. He said. “Bonnard brought color to New York City.”

For Katz the subject is a means to the end. He says, “Style and appearance are things I am more concerned about than what something means.”

Ada is the epitome of glamour in Ada with Bathing Cap (1965), despite the decidedly unglamorous blue bathing cap completely covering her hair. Her perfectly plucked eyebrows, elegant patrician nose, and Angelina Jolie lips (long before Angelina Jolie) verge on cliché cut outs against a landscape of sun-dappled water. Light is what holds all his paintings together brilliantly. Here, the light on her bathing cap, her lower lip, the back of her neck and the water unite and bring life to this canvas and prevent it from being Pop.

Another emotionless but beautiful Ada fills the space we are invited into in Blue Umbrella (1972). Despite the vacant eyes, there is poignancy here. As we contemplate each of these works, we wonder about this woman used as a cultural icon.

With her back to us, Ada heads off in a canoe on tranquil turquoise water towards a low green landscape in Good Afternoon, 2 (1974). The painting is mesmerizing. I kept returning to it because of the quiet and beauty it exudes.

Ada in Front of Black Brook (1988) again shows us the back of Ada's head, with just the edge of a blue floral dress at the bottom of a canvas. She looks into a dense wooded area represented by blocks of chocolate brown, highlighted umber and pale greens. There is mystery and again tranquility here. I think of the paintings of California artist David Parks.

Katz shows Ada smiling enigmatically in Ada's Night (1998), her gray streaked hair lit by moonlight against a dark ground broken only by the yellow lights of the city. His brushstrokes, so sure and spare, are brilliant.

The most difficult thing as a painter is to know what to leave out. The tendency is to include all that the eye encompasses. A painting teacher of mine repeats the maxim, “Remember it is a poem, not a police report.” Katz has taken this to its maximum possibility before veering into abstraction. He has pared down his portraits and landscapes to the barest essentials. His thinned oils painted over layers of white lead base ground and his incomparable sense of composition result in visual poetry.

His paintings are dramatic but never commercial. They are culturally current. There is a sense of the cut outs of Matisse, the scale of Rosenquist and the colors of Rothko and Matisse. He is utterly contemporary yet steeped in art historical tradition.

“Alex Katz Paints Ada” is at the Jewish Museum through March 18. The museum is located at Fifth Avenue and 92 Street. Open Saturday through Wednesday 11 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. and Thursday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Closed Friday. Admission is free on Saturday. For more information, visit www.thejewishmuseum.org or call 212-423-3200.

Art Round-Up
Abstract Artist Featured at the Met

– By Paul Hicks –

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art devotes three of its modern art galleries — including one of its largest — to the work of a living artist, the exhibit is worth a visit, maybe two. Even for those not normally keen on highly abstract, geometric work, "Sean Scully: Wall of Light" is worth a visit.

The exhibit showcases the artist’s most important series to date and highlights his mastery of color, light, gesture and range of emotional and narrative themes. Among the 50 works in the exhibit are oil paintings on canvas, watercolors on paper, pastels and aquatints. They range in size from an 8- by 10-inch watercolor to a 9- by 12-foot oil. Regardless of size or media, all the works are built of brick-like forms in a variety of constructions and colors.

Speaking at the Met, Scully described his recent work as focusing on a formal basic unit or motif consisting of lines, bars and stripes, presented in an infinite range of combinations on a grid. Like other artists, he said, this motif reflects a “19-year evolution” from an early interest in ribbons, lines and stripes when he had one side of a painting be parallel or the mirror of the other side of the painting. He cited Cezanne, Johns and de Kooning as examples of other artists whose motifs reflected a concentrated focus or similar evolutions over time – Cezanne with “apples and mountains,” Johns with “numbers and figures” and de Kooning in terms of the gestures he used.

Light was another subject Scully addressed, indicating that color and tone reflected the nature of the light in the venue where he worked on a painting. The reflection of bright, long lasting light on a wall in Mexico was the inspiration for the series of works in the Met exhibit. He described that as very different from the light that changed every 20 minutes as experienced by Constable in 19th century England. Despite the similarity in motifs of the works on show, it was interesting to hear Scully say that some paintings were completed in a day and others took a year. He described pastel as the most difficult media to work in.

Born in Ireland in 1945, raised in London, and working in typesetting and graphic design before studying painting, Scully received a fellowship to Harvard in the 1970s, settled here and became a U.S. citizen in 1983. He now has studios in New York, London, Germany and Spain. “Sean Scully has long been admired for the power of his abstractions as well as his delicate sensibility of color and touch,” noted Met curator Gary Tinterow.

But Scully said he had a tough road to follow before achieving recognition here, working at construction during the day and playing pool at night to make ends meet.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication and a variety of education programs. It is on view on the mezzanine level of the museum's Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for modern and contemporary art and is featured on the museum's website www.metmuseum.org. Except for most Mondays and some holidays when it is closed, the museum opens daily at 9:30 a.m. The exhibit runs until Jan. 14.

Art Meets Athleticism

Best known for her captivating photographs of the natural world and the life of Rye, JoAnn Cancro discovered the beauty of man (and woman) in motion when she photographed the Westchester Triathlon earlier this fall. Several of her photographer friends encouraged her to mount a show for the community, and she has. “The Art of the Photographer Meets The Art of the Triathlete” opened at the Rye YMCA this week and runs through Nov. 30.

The Y, with its focus on fitness and health, said Cancro, is a great fit for her latest work. “It's my tribute to the immense effort, skill, determination and beauty of these amazing athletes.”

All the works are for sale, with 20 percent of the proceeds going to the Y. Individual photographs may also be ordered in multiple sizes by contacting JoAnn Cancro at jcancro@aol.com.