Alex Katz at the Tacoma Art Museum

Review by Alec Clayton published in the Weekly Volcano, August 2002

Alex Katz, Ada's Black Sandals, 1987,oil on canvas,
48 x 60. Collection of Colby College Museum of Art, 
gift of the artist. 
Photo courtesy of the Tacoma Art Museum.

The Alex Katz exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum changed my opinion of this artist. Frankly, based on years and years of seeing his work in print, I did not have a very high opinion of his work. Here’s what I thought about him prior to seeing the TAM show:

Take paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, take away his art historical and cultural references, take away his spatial trickery, and what have you got? Alex Katz. Take paintings by Andy Warhol, take away his death images and celebrity images and his acid colors and queer sensibility, and what have you got? Alex Katz. Katz’s paintings are limp, bland, happy-go-lucky, simplistic and boring – or so I thought. He jumped on a bandwagon back when Pop Art burst on the scene, and he struck a nerve with the American public; and he’s been riding that wave of popularity for almost 50 years, endlessly repeating his formulaic pictures of friends and family members – or, again, so I thought.

But seeing some 33 of his paintings, collages, prints and cutouts all in one place and in chronological order spanning 50 years of art making was a revelation. I realized that the countless reproductions I have seen over the years look nothing like the actual work. Katz is one of the most frequently reproduced artists alive today, and his work suffers terribly in reproduction. I realized that nothing about an Alex Katz painting is what it appears to be.

His paintings look simplistic, but they’re really not. They look flat, but there is depth that is seen only when looked at long and hard, and which is almost totally lost in reproduction. His colors look bright, but they’re really rather dull; the way he combines colors make them appear brighter than they really are. His figures look wooden and clunky, but that wooden look is purposeful and deceptive; it disguises a marvelously controlled hand and forces the viewer to look at the abstract qualities underlying the figures and their placement on the format. His subjects all seem happy – people in idyllic settings in happy-go-lucky activities like picnicking and playing Frisbee in a park or rowing a boat in a placid stream – but many of these people really look sad; they are people who pretend to be happy.

With a few well-controlled strokes of the brush Katz paints snapshots of people in common activities. Details are reduced to the bare minimum. The figures are often slightly distorted and oddly cropped. More often than not hands and feet are cut off as if drawing them was beyond his abilities. His landscapes are nothing more than a few flat swatches of color representing sky and ground or a house in the distance. They look like the drawings of an untutored child. But then again, that is all purposeful and deceptive.

The truth is, Katz is not a portraitist or a realist; he is an abstract artist. His faces and figures and houses and trees are abstract forms that are more complex than they appear. They are exercises in subtle visual shifts in size and spatial relationships, and they are full of little surprises such as the shifting planes between light and shadow, and the energetic brush strokes hidden in areas of flat paint, and shapes that are so slightly off-kilter that you don’t notice at first but then begin to suffer vertigo if you look long enough and close enough.

This is an important show of a major figure in American art. It should not be missed.

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© 2002 by Alec Clayton