Throughout art history, there have
been a number of notable artists to fall through the cracks of categorization
-- Robert Rauschenberg, Vincent van Gogh, Joseph Beuys -- presumably
because they were not part of a distinctive art movement but rather
an independent creator with a unique vision. Sam Hunter, in his biography
of Katz, has accused Alex Katz of such innovation, describing what Katz
does as "reconciling realism with both Modernism and Postmodernism."
For an artist who has been prolifically creative and academically respected
during Abstract Expressionism's grip on the art world and later through
the reign of Pop Art, Katz has remained true to his own school of thought.
Living in New York in the 1950s, Katz was surrounded
by the art and artists of Abstract Expressionism, rubbing elbows almost
daily with them in the East Village. Though that movement took the
world by storm, Katz rejected the emotionally charged abstractions
of artists such as Pollock and DeKooning in favor of his own cool,
representational work. When the dominant trend in artmaking involved
emotional outbursts of color, Katz was filling galleries with spare,
simplified portraits and landscapes painted with brilliant control.
Hunter describes Katz's portraiture as having a "lack of any
apparent interest in revealing his sitter's personality," and
Katz himself would agree, as he denies his work to contain narrative;
"There aren't any stories there," he explains.
Rather, what concerns Katz is the appearance
of his prints and the translation of a three-dimensional world onto
a two dimensional surface. The visual effects produced by the marks
he creates are like snapshots, capturing instantaneous light to communicate
a very specific time or place by the quality of light.
While the woman
in January may cause the
viewer to ponder what her thoughts may be (i.e. Mona Lisa), Katz
will never offer any clues to such content, for he believes that "content
is not an idea that's given beforehand; it emerges in the interaction
between the painting and the spectator." Thus, Katz makes no
assumptions or judgements, no comments concerning his subjects. These
are not sentimental images of his boyhood vacation spot, but simply
scenes that caught his eye. His major communication to us is to see
without interpreting things that are not visually presented, and
to evaluate the images as what they are - images.
Therefore, Katz presents his audience with images that
are reductive, concerned with being ultimate images of our visual
world; that is, imagery about visual reality. Without being bogged
down with emotional baggage, Katz's works are intent on drawing our
attention to formal concerns of light, scale, and our perceptions
of color interaction, drawing on the lessons of Joseph Albers who
taught at Yale while Katz was a student there.
In Katz's work -- and most clearly illustrated with
the landscape prints -- Katz is minimal, abstract, and realistic
at the same time. With simplified detail and economical line, Katz
is able to convey an entire environment. Sunset on the Lake IV 1972
illustrates the artists' ability to take a landscape and summarize
it for the viewer, so that only the pure essence of that scene remains.
Using only a few tones of the same beige hue, Katz communicates the
warmth, the haziness, and the stillness of a late summer evening.
The Daytona Beach suite of prints further illustrates
Katz' versatility and strength in his interpretation of landscape.
Through its reductive way of presenting the viewer with an atmospheric
analysis of a scene, the piece creates an entire environment for
the viewer. And while this particular suite is radically minimal
and abstract, it is still firmly rooted in factual presentation,
ignoring extraneous elements, only communicating what is there and
disregarding what is not there.
We must thank Alex Katz, for opening our eyes
to see reality in a new way. For what Katz's prints reveal is a
unique approach to realism, real not because they are "real," but
because they are not "unreal." Images that do not deny
that they are images but rather embrace two-dimensionality. This
is realism informed by abstraction, realism that acknowledges multiple
levels of reality, for what more is an image of a grassy landscape
than a field of pure green color?
Michael Berger Gallery
