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The Cocktail Party /
Ada with a Bathing Cap /
Self-Portrait /
Yellow House
Cocktail parties were a favorite subject for Alex Katz in the 1960s. Here, he depicts one in his New York studio; another large painting from the same year shows a similar gathering on the lawn at his summer house in Maine. In each, the artist represents his immediate environment as one populated by a stylish group comfortably enjoying the privileges of their station—an effect compounded for art world denizens who could find their peers' faces in the crowd. For Katz, this aspect of the work was not inconsequential, as he noted about this painting, "I had to use something that was part of my life. I mean I couldn't paint angels or people in Vietnam, stuff like that." [Interview with Alex Katz] At the same time, the ambitious, multi-figured painting was motivated by the formal concerns of a representational painter, as he explained:
Complicated compositions such as this one can easily become chaotic. To
establish visual order, Katz here deployed a few, key formal devices. First, all
the figures, regardless of their distance from the viewer, are the same height
so that they fill the bottom half of the canvas as a uniform mass. Above them,
the canvas is divided into thirds by the dark studio windows whose rhythmic
rectangles are echoed in those of the buildings across the street. Katz supports
this very stable geometry with a palette limited primarily to black, white, and
grey; a few additions of local color—especially from the red family—punctuate
the bottom center of the composition.
Ada Katz has been the wife, model, and muse of
painter Alex Katz for fifty years. He began painting her in 1957, a year before
their marriage, in the simplified figurative style that he was developing to
distinguish himself from peers committed to abstraction or assemblage. Since
then, his style has moved toward smooth surfaces, crisp edges, and bright
colors, but his representations of the woman herself have remained constant, as
evinced in the recent exhibition Alex Paints Ada. In these paintings, the
impeccably stylish Ada veils her emotions behind a façade of placid beauty. Her averted gaze in Ada with a Bathing Cap offers scant clues to the inner life of the woman posing in the costume of a carefree vacationer.
Among the most prominent and devoted practitioners of contemporary
self-portraiture, Chuck Close has been representing himself in paintings,
drawings, prints, and photographs for almost four decades.
Self-Portrait/Photogravure, a recent addition to this oeuvre, is consistent with
his early work in important ways. Like
Big Self-Portrait,
Close's famous painting of 1968, the print is an oversized, close-up, grisaille
image of the artist's face derived from a photograph of his own making. Unlike
that important antecedent and much of Close's work thereafter,
Self-Portrait/Photogravure represents its photographic source—a large-scale,
black and white Polaroid image—wholly unmediated by the artist's hand. Such
fidelity to a photographic original is a key attribute of the
photogravure process by which this print was made.
As Katz's summer residence and workplace, the Yellow House has served as the base of operations for outdoor activities that frequently become the subject of his paintings, as in Ada with a Bathing Cap. The house itself has also figured in his work; for example, it was the setting for Lawn Party, a summer version of The Cocktail Party that was executed the same year. As in his representations of his wife, Ada, and his Soho studio, Katz's depiction of the Yellow House can be read as a proxy for the artist himself. The painting's elegant formal arrangement and smooth surface suggests an idealized world of perfect balance—one that Katz advertises as his own. Within the notorious Young British Artists group, Martin Maloney stands out. Over the past two decades, his subtle and sardonic wit markedly differs from the “shock tactics” employed by his peers. Through the use of deliberately crude drawings, often with underlying references to art history, Maloney crafts a societal commentary that challenges our perceptions of social roles in contemporary Britain. This work portrays a lone woman, blown up to superhuman proportions, confronting the viewer with an awkward intimacy. As stated by Maloney, “the working-class single mother is usually seen as a victim plagued by social problems. I wanted to paint the opposite of that.” Here, Maloney has created a contemporary woman, who despite lacking a wedding ring, is deliberately portrayed with the status symbols of a sheik: cropped haircut, jewelry and a fur coat. The significance of these details is accentuated by Maloney’s distinct “bad” drawing style, which omits any details that are not essential to the overall message of the work. The inclusion of the dog within this work is most likely a reference to the 18th century portraiture trend of coupling aristocratic woman with their dogs. This etching, which was created for a portfolio celebrating the 90th birthday of renowned art dealer Leo Castelli in September 1997, is indicative of the emphasis on materials and methods that define Richard Serra’s career. In this work, the powerful, dense black shape celebrates the etching process through articulating the methodical way that the ink was applied with a roller. On account of the three dimensional texture of the ink, Leo transcends the flat medium of etching, forging a sculpture of ink. Furthermore, the curvature of the shape cultivates a tension within the work, evoking the notion of the force of gravity at work. Richard Serra, American, born 1939, Study for Carnegie 1984-85, hot rolled steel, 48 x 18 x 18 inches. Collection of Paul J. Schupf, Class of 1958 Photograph by Warren Wheeler Composed of conjoined trapezoidal steel plates, both sculptures were created by Serra as models. They epitomize Serra’s inventiveness, which arguably makes him the most important contemporary sculptor. As opposed to molding the metal to make it look like the human figure or a stylized design, in these works Serra is boldly celebrating the medium itself through showcasing the fact that these are sculptures of steel. By precariously balancing slabs of metal against one another, Serra is forcing his viewers to experience the weight of the metal and the sculpture’s struggle to stay erect against the force of gravity. The intended final versions of the models were to stand at a staggering height of 40 feet. (Only the sculpture Carnegie was built in full scale. It is located in front of the Carnegie Museum of Art.) When contemplating the models, one can only imagine the power and awe inspiring monumentality that the realized massive works hold or would have held over their viewers, manipulating their perception of space and stability as they walked around it. Daises 1 is an acute example of Katz’s masterful ability to fuse the quick spontaneity of action painting brushstrokes with the kitschy, contrived compositions of Pop art and the limited palette of minimalism. While this work lacks the crisp edges and smooth surfaces that typify most of Katz’s work, the flat simplified figurative style coupled with the idyllic well-lit flowers create the glamorous mass culture ambiance that Katz has become famous for. In these images of an electric chair, Warhol’s use of captivating colors and tantalizing abstract forms works to distract viewers from the morbid connotations typically associated with execution machines. Warhol also desensitizes the viewer through using the silk screen process to create repetitive images, consequently jading the viewer and detracting from the overall emotional impact of the electric chair image. Yet while this repetition detracts from the gruesome nature of the chair, it also lends a new power to the work, crating a tense dichotomy between the aesthetic beauty of the shapes and colors and the morbidity of the underlying subject matter. In contrast to the cool mechanical tone typically found in Warhol’s prints, the gestural brushstrokes and stark color choices showcase Warhol’s presence within these works. In this preparatory drawing for an aluminum cut-out, we find an intimate and revealing view into Alex Katz’s creation process. After planning out the dimensions of the figure, Katz created a stencil outline of the silhouette, which used to transfer the image onto this paper, before ultimately recreating the outline on the metal plate that he used for the final image. To transfer this outline, Katz utilized the technique of pouncing, popular during the Renaissance. It entails applying a fine powdery pulverized charcoal over a stencil to easily transfer a design onto a new surface. While this pounced outline and quick pencil marks may only be a rough sketch, even in this early stage of production Katz’s simple figurative style makes it easy to discern the warm, oversized, Hollywood-esque glamour figure that this sketch would ultimately turn into. |
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