Alex Katz knows when to shut up. This stunning painting proves it.
by Sebastian Smee
by Sebastian Smee
Alex Katz, who turned 98 last month, paints paeans to summer. There's much more to his repertoire, of course. But anyone who has kept track of Katz's production over the past seven decades will struggle to disassociate his work from long, glittering afternoons in coastal Maine.
Zinging color and painterly dash have always been Katz's strong suits. "Good Afternoon," a 1974 painting that hangs in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, builds on a harmony of blue and green that's as eye-flushing and fresh as on the good afternoon when Katz put down his brushes, having concluded ( earlier than most painters, you suspect) that it was finished.
Borrowing from the idioms of movie close-ups and fashion illustration, Katz squeezes more flavor and subtlety out of color than all but a handful of modern masters. The water here is a uniform field, utterly unruffled, taking up most of the picture. Its drenching turquoise sits on the color spectrum between the blue stripes of the paddler's T-shirt and the stretched green band of distant hills and tufted trees.
The way Katz differentiates the reflection of things from the things themselves here is brilliant: He slightly darkens the hue of the canoe's reflection, and then, with a cartoonist's efficiency, simply interrupts the outlines of the reflected boat, oar, arm and hat with a few small, horizontal tears.
Borrowing from the idioms of movie close-ups and fashion illustration, Katz squeezes more flavor and subtlety out of color than all but a handful of modern masters. The water here is a uniform field, utterly unruffled, taking up most of the picture. Its drenching turquoise sits on the color spectrum between the blue stripes of the paddler's T-shirt and the stretched green band of distant hills and tufted trees.
The way Katz differentiates the reflection of things from the things themselves here is brilliant: He slightly darkens the hue of the canoe's reflection, and then, with a cartoonist's efficiency, simply interrupts the outlines of the reflected boat, oar, arm and hat with a few small, horizontal tears.
Katz first took to painting outside in the landscape during a spell at Maine's Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the late 1940s. He liked to paint briskly. He didn't fuss over things. "It was a kick, it was a real blast," he remembered. "It was like feeling lust for the first time."
There's something almost Nabokovian - and never sentimental - in the way Katz distills fleeting visuals into abiding, revivified memory sensations. If pleasure were less a feeling than an empirical entity -something palpable that could be pointed at, conserved, perhaps even measured - Katz would be its loyal keeper.
His work makes me think about the question of finish and how, exactly, it relates to the creative ordeal of beginning. In an era of visual onslaught, and maximum, digitally enabled elaboration, his eye for distillation often points to a refusal even to begin to describe phenomena - like waves or ripples, for instance - that most other artists wouldn't think to omit.
This restraint can give his work the charismatic power of an orator who steps to the lectern, then declines to speak. In fact, I often imagine his loaded brush hovering an inch from the canvas, contemplating whether to mark in a few wavelets around the oar, then quietly, silently withdrawing.