Press Release
ALEX KATZ
QUICK LIGHT
2 June – 11 September 2016
Serpentine Gallery
(Serpentine Gallery closed all day on 6 July and reopens at 1pm on 7 July)
“It’s the instantaneous light. If you get it right then you get it in the total
present tense - that’s what you’re going for, that’s eternity.” (Alex Katz)
The Serpentine presents the work of renowned American painter Alex Katz
(b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York). Coming of age as an artist in 1950s New York,
Katz developed his unique approach to contemporary representational
painting during the height of Abstract Expressionism.
Over the five and a half decades since his first exhibition in 1954, Katz has
produced a celebrated body of work, including paintings, drawings, sculpture
and prints. Establishing himself as a pre-eminent painter of modern life, he
was influenced by films, billboard advertising, music, poetry and his close
circle of friends and family. His portraits and landscapes are characterised
by their flatness of colour and fluidity of line, reinventing both genres within
the context of abstract painting and contemporary image-making.
The Serpentine exhibition takes landscape as its focus, bringing together
Katz’s extraordinarily productive output of recent years alongside select
works from the past two decades. Katz’s landscape paintings exemplify his
life-long quest to capture the present tense in paint. Regardless of their
scale, Katz describes these paintings as ‘environmental’ in the way in which
they envelop the viewer. Defined by temporal qualities of light, times of the
day and the changing of the seasons, these paintings respond and relate to
the unique context of the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. The
exhibition will also include a recent series of portraits.
Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine Galleries, said:
“We are thrilled to be presenting Alex Katz at the Serpentine Gallery this
summer and to introduce his extraordinary landscape paintings to a new
audience in such a fitting setting during our summer season. Katz’s
investigations into perceptions of scale and the effects of light have
produced a distinctive body of images that continue to influence
generations of artists.”
Katz draws parallels between his approach to painting and his interest in
poetry, both equally concerned with stripping away unnecessary detail to
leave only the essential information. This relationship between language and
the painting process is echoed in the work of painter, poet and filmmaker
Etel Adnan, showing in parallel at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, whose
landscapes are similarly defined by their bold colour and simplified form
that is nevertheless rooted in keen observation of the world around her.
The summer season at the Serpentine also includes the Serpentine
Pavilion designed by Bjarke Ingels and the Summer Houses designed by
Kunlé Adeyemi – NLÉ, Barkow Leibinger, Yona Friedman and Asif Khan, which
opens to the public on 10 June, and the Park Nights series of live events.
For press information contact:
Miles Evans, [email protected], +44 (0)20 7298 1544
V Ramful, [email protected], +44 (0)20 7298 1519
Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/press
Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, West Carriage Drive, Kensington Gardens, London
W2 2AR
Image Credit:
Alex Katz
Reflection 7, 2008
Oil on linen, 274.3 x 548.6 cm
Courtesy Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Rome/New York, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London,
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg
© Alex Katz, DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2016
Photograph: Paul Takeuchi
Notes to Editors
Alex Katz (b. 1927, New York) lives and works in New York and Maine. He
graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art, New York in 1949 and the
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine in 1950. Selected solo
exhibitions include: The High Museum, Atlanta; Guggenheim, Bilbao (2015–6);
Tate St Ives; Turner Contemporary, Margate (both 2012); The National
Portrait Gallery, London (2010); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007);
Albertina, Vienna (2010); Saatchi Gallery, London (1998); P.S.1 / Institute for
Contemporary Art, New York (1997-8); Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno,
Valencia (1996); Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (1995); Brooklyn
Musuem (1988); Vancouver Art Museum (1977).
ALEX KATZ
QUICK LIGHT
SERPENTINE GALLERY
2 JUNE – 11 SEPTEMBER 2016
Unless otherwise stated works are courtesy the artist, Gavin Brown’s enterprise,
Rome/New York, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg
SOUTH GALLERY
Ada, 2015
Oil on linen
152.4 x 304.8 cm (60 x 120 inches)
Courtesy Private Collection
Vivien, 2015
Oil on linen
213.4 x 426.7 cm (84 x 168 inches)
Maja Hoffmann Collection
Anna, 2015
Oil on linen
121.9 x 289.6 cm (48 x 114 inches)
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg
SMALL WEST GALLERY
January 7PM, 1997
Oil on linen
243.8 x 304.8 cm (96 x 120 inches)
Private Collection
Courtesy Galería Javier López & Fer Francés, Madrid
White Impatiens 2, 2012
Oil on linen
152.4 x 213.4 cm (60 x 84 inches)
WEST GALLERY
Untitled Cityscape 4, 2014
Oil on linen
213.4 x 152.4 cm (84 x 60 inches)
Nicole, 2015
Oil on linen
152.4 x 304.8 cm (60 x 120 inches)
Reflection 7, 2008
Oil on linen
274.3 x 548.6 cm (108 x 216 inches)
West 1, 1998
Oil on linen
243.8 x 487.7 cm (96 x 192 inches)
NORTH GALLERY
City Landscape, 1995
Oil on linen
304.8 x 609.6 cm (120 x 240 inches)
Udo and Anette Brandhorst Collection
Black Brook 18, 2014
Oil on linen
243.8 x 304.8 cm (96 x 120 inches)
Cross Light 3, 2015
Oil on linen
342.9 x 457.2 cm (135 x 180 inches)
Maja Hoffmann Collection
4 pm, 2014
Oil on linen
365.8 x 274.3 cm (144 x 108 inches)
The Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman
EAST GALLERY
Red House 1, 2015
Oil on linen
182.9 x 182.9 cm (72 x 72 inches)
Albertina, Vienna – Batliner Collection
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg
Fog, 2014
Oil on linen
274.3 x 548.6 cm (108 x 216 inches)
Christy, 2015
Oil on linen
182.9 x 365.8 cm (72 x 144 inches)
Emma, 2015
Oil on linen
213.7 x 426.7 cm (84 x 168 inches)
Private Collection
Courtesy Jamie McCourt
SMALL EAST GALLERY
Red House 3, 2013
Oil on linen
203.2 x 213.4 cm (80 x 84 inches)
Snow Scene 3, 2014
Oil on linen
213.4 x 274.3 cm (84 x 108 inches)
Courtesy Rodrigo & Ninfa Ripstein Collection
but it was a way of getting into something more open. If you think about it,
in the late 1940s and 50s, most paintings had black lines enclosing them – you
know, Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Mondrian: the black line. And then in Cubism
everything was in planes. I started to paint and I just forgot everything and then
the lessons were all absorbed unconsciously. I found out that things were going
great and I wasn’t even thinking about it, and that was the start. There was a lot
of connection, total connection.
A conversation
Alex Katz & Hans Ulrich Obrist, with Vincent Katz
H A NS U L R IC H OBR I S T Was there an epiphany that brought you to art?
H UO And would that be the moment where your catalogue raisonné starts?
A K
Well the paintings that I was doing then weren’t very good! When I came back
to the city I was comparing the art I did at Cooper to the plein-air work, and
one was not as bad or as good as the other, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do.
I knew what I wanted to do, it was very clear: I wanted to make a modern realistic
painting. The whole idea of what was considered realistic looked like oldfashioned painting but I wanted to do something new. It took me seven or eight
years to get to something that people liked – to get an audience.
H UO And to come back to the catalogue raisonné, what is the number one?
A K
Oh, I don’t know. What would you say, Vincent?
A L E X K AT Z No, it’s something I always liked to do. I painted and I just liked doing it.
I painted all over my parent’s walls [laughs]. I drew all over the staircase and
they thought it was OK. They left it there for years.
H UO So it wasn’t an encounter with an artwork that changed everything?
It was something that was always present.
A K
It was very gradual. I was intimidated by art because it was presented to me as
something that geniuses did. I had very little talent, but I liked doing it. I didn’t
think of becoming a serious artist until after I’d finished art school. Then I said,
‘Let’s go for it!’
H UO And was that at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York?
A K
Yes, it was. Cooper Union was one of the few modern art schools in the
United States.
H UO You once called it a Bauhaus of provincial modern art. Did you have heroes or
heroines at that time?
A K
No, not in the school. I liked Cézanne. By the time I got out of Cooper, I could
appreciate Matisse and Picasso and Miró and so the teachers’ scene wasn’t where
I wanted to go.
H UO You once said in an interview that in 1950, when you were at the Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, you had a ‘plein-air moment’.
There’s a return to plein air right now, so I’m curious about your early
plein-air work.
A K
Well, for me it was a way of getting into the unconscious, because I didn’t have to
think things through like I was doing with modern art. It was in the air. Jackson
Pollock was working on the unconscious. I didn’t know Pollock when I started,
V I NC E N T K AT Z 8
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The date that’s in my mind is around 1951. For example, Two Boys (1951).
A K
OK … is that it? [laughs]
V K
And a couple of others from that era.
A K
I painted with white grounds in the very early 1950s because I was trying to put
as little paint on the canvas as possible. There’s a tree painting titled Winter Scene
(1951–2) in the Museum of Modern Art that’s just all-white gesso with black lines
on it.
V K
It’s important to think of the exhibitions that you saw in 1950 and 51.
A K
Oh yes. New York, you have to understand, was a provincial town in the 1940s,
but there was the Berlin loan exhibition, there was a great Rembrandt exhibition,
and there was an Austrian exhibition. The National Museum in Austria lent
paintings, including a great Velázquez.
H UO Ah, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Winter Scene, 1951–2
A K
H UO A K
Yes, they sent the loan. Prior to that, I’d read books and they’d say what a great
painter Velázquez is, and I’d seen a couple of Velázquez works in print, but they
didn’t look so hot.
Then your own first exhibition was in 1954 at the Roko Gallery. Can you tell me
about this exhibition?
A K
Roko Gallery was at the back of a frame shop. There were very few exhibition
spaces then. I showed a lot of thinly painted landscapes. Actually, a big part of
the art world saw that show and some friends bought three or four paintings,
but no one understood them. Frank O’Hara wrote a good review (p. 22); he
sort of understood it. Later on he apologised – he thought it should have been
a rave – but he gave me a nice review and that was it.
H UO By that time had you already moved on to the more flat, monotone backgrounds?
A K
When I first started I did a lot of continuum paintings for a couple of years,
but I decided to paint flatter in 1953 or 54. By 1954 I was using flat colour.
H UO And how did you arrive at this idea of the monotone background?
A K
I was looking at abstract painting and the colours had light and depth, so I
opened it up. The big thing was when I did the figures on a flat ground, and it
had to do with the ground having air so the figures could fit legitimately into
the ground.
H UO Can we talk about the cut-outs. Didn’t they come about following an invitation
to do a play?
A K
No, I did the play with Kenneth Koch because he saw the show of the cut-outs.
H UO So it was the other way round. How did you invent the cut-outs?
A K
I had a painting of life-sized figures that didn’t work. I got so depressed that
I just cut the figures out. I said, ‘They look pretty good’, but then I found the
life-size figures weren’t actually big enough, and then I started asking myself,
‘What is life-size?’ So I did it with classical sculpture forms, trying them in
different sizes and realised that it’s about perception. I made the portrait
of Frank O’Hara seven-eighths life-size.
H UO You once said that you wanted energy to spread beyond the edge of the image,
as if it were a human being. Can you tell me about this?
A K
Again, it has to do with perception. Energy passes beyond the edges of a person.
When you see them dead, you’re always surprised how small they are. When you
cut out a photograph, it doesn’t go beyond the edge. My early ones were really
So that was very important for you?
Yes, very important. You really saw what a great painting is.
H UO And Rembrandt also particularly struck you?
A K
Well they had a Rembrandt exhibition at Wildenstein gallery showing many
of his masterpieces. My appreciation of Rembrandt is technical. I really find
the humanist stuff tasteless, but the technical skill was fantastic to me.
H UO At that time Abstract Expressionism was the only show in town, as you once
said – it almost had a monopoly. Was there something of a rebellion against that,
for your generation?
A K
H UO Yes. On the one hand it was freedom from Europe; we were no longer provincial
the minute AE hit. I grasped that, but the Abstract Expressionists all seemed
very pompous and had this macho attitude that I found really silly – posturing,
posing – they all seemed very fake.
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H UO gestural; I was trying to get the energy beyond the edge. It also has to do with
size. The big faces I painted had to do with perceptions of scale, like a movie –
the movie is life-size, but the face is actually 20 feet high.
A K
Yes, chance is a big thing in painting. Sometimes it doesn’t make any difference
what colour I use. There’s an element of chance all the time; you just relax and
hope it works out.
It’s interesting that you mention the movies, because about ten years ago I spent
an afternoon in Kraków with the great poet Czesław Miłosz. To my surprise, he
talked about cinema, and said that everybody in the twentieth century, whether
a writer, a painter, a poet or an architect, was influenced by cinema – it was
impossible not to be. I suppose that’s the case for you as well.
H UO You said that with these monumental paintings you wanted to have something
that was contained and aggressive at the same time.
A K
Well, I didn’t like the big gestural thing of de Kooning, so in that way it was
contained, but I wanted to be able to knock his work off the wall! My paintings
don’t look aggressive when you’re near them, but if you put them next to other
people’s paintings, you’ll see they’re very aggressive. And it has to do with the
light, which is quick. Impressionist light is slow, de Kooning and Pollock’s light
was quick, and John Singer Sargent’s light is very quick. I wanted that quick light
so the painting comes out really fast at you.
H UO Yes, you said that you wanted to – I love this sentence – to burn an image into
someone’s head.
A K
Absolutely. I want to make paintings that you’re forced to remember.
A K
Oh definitely.
H UO What was its influence?
A K
When I finished work, I’d go to a movie, pay and walk in. I didn’t care what the
name of the movie was and what part of the movie I walked into. I’d look at the
pictures to get away from traditional imagery. You’d see a big head on the side
of the screen – a big face and a lot of landscape. I hadn’t seen that in art and
so I was influenced by a lot of that imagery from the movies.
H UO And were there any movies in particular?
H UO It’s similar to Federico García Lorca, who said a great poem is like a corkscrew
into your brain.
A K
No, I didn’t care, mostly Westerns. I’d just walk in. Of course, if you walked in
at the beginning, it’d be a worse movie! Much better to walk in in the middle.
A K
Yes, I don’t want to make decoration.
H UO You often talk about painting fast: to paint fast is to start with one side of your
mind, let go, and then let the other side do it.
A K
That started with painting en plein air. And then I painted from photographs a lot
in the early 1950s, and it was the same idea – when you paint fast you don’t think,
your unconscious does it, and all your lessons are absorbed by your unconscious.
I did three years of antique drawing in high school and I went through three
years at Cooper Union with Cubism, with planes and stuff, and it gets absorbed
so you don’t have to think, you just start working. And I work automatically, and
someone says, ‘Oh, what great space.’ I’ve never thought about space, I’ve just
thought about getting the paint on the canvas.
H UO So you’re absorbed, but also the viewer can become absorbed, particularly in your
very big landscape paintings.
A K
Well that’s the idea. I was walking in Maine in winter and I saw some snow
against a tree, which gave me the idea of making a landscape that was
H UO A K
H UO Miłosz also mentioned that, for him, film was monumental. Obviously there’s
something very monumental in terms of the scale in your paintings. Is there
any connection?
Films led to the big faces, and when you’re looking at my big face paintings,
it’s like a movie. When you see a movie, the actual size is maybe 20 or 40 feet,
but you still relate it to yourself and your scale, and that’s what I was trying to
do. Some monumental things, like Buddhas and Egyptian statues, are supposed
to be big and not relate to your scale. So the problem was to take something
really big and make it relate to you. The flower paintings were enormous blowups, but it took me about six months to get one to work on a big scale and
seem like it was on your scale. Before that they seemed gargantuan. I was
painting flowers and they all looked like Mount Everest, and all of a sudden
I got one to work. And then they all worked after that and I don’t know what
the difference was.
What role does chance play in this process?
Frank O’Hara, 1959–60
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‘environmental’, where in other words, you’re in the landscape. I wanted a
landscape that really enveloped you. I developed the idea after I had the big
retrospective in the Whitney in 1986. After that I said, ‘I’m not just going to
continue to paint masterpieces’, and so I got involved in this environmental
landscape. There have to be precedents. I think Gustave Courbet did a couple
of really big landscapes that are almost that.
H UO How did you decide what to do there? Because it’s such a public painting.
A K
Pretty girls! You can’t go wrong with pretty girls!
V K
But did you think about the other billboards facing them?
A K
No, I didn’t think about them at all. The guy had painted 20-foot heads,
wet-on-wet, and we were wondering whether the secondary tones held,
so I’d come in from Maine and we’d go on the street and look at it and we
decided it would hold. Later, some guy in an airplane said, ‘What’s my ex-wife
doing at Times Square?’ The imagery had carried up to an airplane, and it
was really strong!
H UO You’ve said several times in previous interviews that light holds it all together,
so what is light?
A K
Light is the initial flash of what you see; that’s what I’m after. People ask me
about the colours, but the colours are irrelevant. I can change the colours as
long as I’ve got the light. People think that my colours are really specific but
they’re not because I’m looking for an overall light.
H UO And so that was the biggest painting. What’s the smallest you’ve ever done?
H UO So you don’t have a favourite colour?
A K
I did a cut-out horse, and I cut out a dog this big [gestures].
A K
No, and I don’t care about it. I say, ‘Well the background is grey but to get
the light right I have to transpose it.’
H UO Wow, that’s like a microgram.
A K
And the collages are very tiny. I don’t know how I did them.
That’s very interesting because in the twentieth century many artists,
like Johannes Itten and Josef Albers, had colour theories. So you don’t have
a colour theory?
H UO In the historic avant-garde there were a lot of links to poetry, which has played
a very important role for you for several decades. How did your interest start?
A K
No, those colour theories are very boring. They’re pedantic, dogmatic.
A K
H UO What’s the biggest painting you’ve ever made?
A K
The Times Square billboard in 1977, which was 250 feet long. I always had a
dream of being able to put a painting up in Times Square next to the billboards
and have it hold up. Times Square was very dead at that point and to liven it
up a city group gave billboards to artists. And I was already painting big and
this woman came over and said, ‘Would you like to paint a billboard in Times
Square?’ I tried to be cool and said, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting’, but I was dying
to do it! The billboard I liked was 250 feet long and 20 feet high, and it went
round a corner and had a 60-foot tower on it. I thought I’d like to do pretty girls,
like the Elgin Marbles frieze, with all that motion and the horses. It took me
about three months to make and by that time the agency that was organising it
had folded. We needed money to complete it, so I cut up the maquettes and we
sold them. We got a house painter to paint the billboard and it was up for about
five years. Then it chipped and it was remade.
I always liked poetry. In the 1950s, Johnny Myers was publishing poets, and
Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch were writing poetry, and I just seemed to get
it. It’s the same thing as with the scale – one day you don’t get it and the next
day you do and I sort of got poetry. Once I got the new poetry then I could get
more interested in old poetry. But I always liked poetry when I was in college;
even when I was in the navy I used to read it but I never got into the modern
things. I was there when John Ashbery returned from Paris and he changed
the whole poetry world. He did a reading in the Living Theatre Palace in
around 1963. It was cool.
Up until then Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg were very hot. Ashbery came
in a business suit with a shirt and a tie. I remember he had a very sharp suit
and no pocket for the handkerchief, and he had a very neat haircut and he
read in a monotone. So he was like Stan Getz but six, seven, or eight years
later. It was a current. Styling in art is a big current that no one controls and
it goes across all the arts. In the early 1950s you had bebop, William Faulkner
and Pollock and they were all doing the same thing.
H UO 14
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H UO Without knowing about each other?
A K
No. I mean, de Kooning found Faulkner, but basically it was just a current in the
air. And I think the cool current in the early 1950s was Stan Getz and those guys,
and then all of a sudden there was no more hot jazz. Bebop was cool and Ashbery
was the cool poet.
H UO So it was the next step after the Beat Generation?
A K
Yes, the Beat Generation was obsolete. It was gone. The cool came in and they
were out. The clothes went from zoot suits to Ivy League with thin lapels.
H UO So if you had to name one living poet that is closest to you, would you
say Ashbery?
A K
Ashbery was the great stylist of the 1960s. Jimmy Schuyler was the most refined,
Kenneth Koch has wonderful energy, but Frank O’Hara was extending himself
emotionally all the time. He’s my all-time greatest poet.
H UO How did you meet him?
A K
He reviewed my first show. He said there was an ‘oriental calm’ to the work and
I thought it was very hot; it made me revisit what I was doing. I became friends
with Jane Freilicher, who had soirées, and I met Frank there. In the late 1950s he
came to my studio; he actually bought two of my works. He’d never bought from
any other painter, and we became friends.
Alex Katz in his Maine studio, 2015
V K
‘For with regret I leave the lovely world men made. Despite their bad character,
their art is mild.’ 2 That was Denby. He was an important person for you.
H UO And did you do books with him? Because with Ashbery you did.
H UO Can you talk about him?
A K
I did several books with Ashbery. But no, I never did a book with Frank. He died
so young. He had an emotional and intellectual investment in a lot of people and
I was lucky to be one of them.
A K
I saw him almost every day for nearly ten years. We were really close. I had a
street education and he had a classical education.
H UO You were learning from each other.
He said once, ‘I’m ashamed of my century for being so entertaining but I have
to smile.’ 1
A K
Yes. It was amazing because he was interested, and his classical education was
fantastic, but he didn’t get a lot of the ‘street’ stuff.
[Laughs] That’s a great line. That’s sort of like Edwin Denby. Didn’t he say
something like that?
V K
He was a great dance critic and you took him to Afro-Cuban dances.
H UO A K
1 Frank O’Hara, Naphtha, 1959
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2 Edwin Denby. ‘Ciampino: Envoi’
in Mediterranean Cities, 1956
A K
H UO Oh yes, it was very funny. We were dancing at the Palladium, which was
Afro-Cuban. I ran into Rudy Burckhardt on the street. I’d seen Rudy’s movies
and they were fantastic, so I introduced myself to him. He lived near me and
he came up to the studio. He was very excited about the works and he said,
‘Well, I’ll photograph your work and you give me a painting.’ And I said,
‘Great, because I have no money.’ And then I said, ‘I’m going dancing on
Saturday night, do you want to come along?’ So he came along with Denby,
but they didn’t dance, they just stood there. Then Denby starts asking me
questions about the dances, so I explained, ‘Well the mambo is different from
the cha cha cha,’ and told him what the rhythms are. Then I started to ask,
‘What do you do?’ and he passed himself off as a half-assed poet! So I went
over to see him and we hit it off.
No, I don’t think so. There are some painting ideas I have to get to when I’ve
finished with my current body of work. For example, I saw a photo on the back
of a cornflake box of a girl with a towel over her head that was great. I’ll try that.
H UO Dan Graham always says that we can only understand an artist if we also
understand what kind of music he listens to. You said once that you drifted from
jazz to Sonny Rollins, who for you is the last jazz musician, and after that it was
over with music, and you then went into poetry.
A K
We were really into music and then we started watching live poetry a lot more.
The jazz got cerebral in about 1967/8, with Cecil Taylor. I like more visceral music.
H UO And at the moment do you listen to music when you work?
A K
Yes, I listen to music. It varies what I’m listening to. Sometimes I listen to
Bach’s St Matthew Passion for a long time, and I’ll listen to German lieder, and
I’m listening to a lot of Sonny Rollins this summer. And the video of me painting
has Meredith Monk singing [Five Hours, 1996].
H UO Who did this video?
V K
My wife, Vivien Bittencourt, and I. It focuses on the process of the painting one
work, filmed in the studio in 1996; there’s no talking at all. The sound is of one
of the singers that he was listening to that day. Then we took some more of her
music and made up the whole soundtrack. He had also painted and made a print
of Meredith Monk.
H UO One thing we haven’t spoken about yet is the studio. There are your portraits, your
landscapes, your still lifes, and I was wondering how the process works – do you
work on all these things in parallel or one at a time?
A K
I always work on a lot of things at once. I work in series of paintings and
there can be two going on at the same time but the large paintings I don’t do
simultaneously. I do one painting, then a few days later I’ll do another. The studies
might be going on simultaneously for different works, drawings of some of these.
H UO But all of these parallel realities continue – you continue to do landscapes and you
obviously continue to do portraits.
A K
Yes, I went into flowers and I hadn’t been doing many landscapes, and all of a
sudden at the end of the summer I had an urge to paint a house in a landscape.
The paint was going on great, so I just followed the paint. I got out of the painting
So that was the beginning. Did you do books with him?
A K
No. I made a lot of portraits of him but no books. He wasn’t publishing much.
H UO Can you tell me about the books with Ashbery?
A K
I thought of doing parallel illustrations – in other words, not literal illustrations,
work that felt like what he was doing. So I took photographs of my own work and
made them into grisailles. And I finished a whole bunch of them. I gave them to
him and he just put them where he thought they should be and it worked out
really well. And we did the second book the same. How many books have we
done with him, just two?
V K
A K
You did Fragment in 1969 and you did Coma Berenices in 2005.
A K
The later one we did photogravure, the same idea. I did two with Kenneth Koch
as well, and a play with Jimmy Schuyler, a great big painting titled after the play
Shopping and Waiting (1953).
H UO In an interview with Richard Prince, you said that you’re a dilettante in poetry –
do you write your own poetry?
A K
No, no, no, no, no!
H UO But do you write at all?
A K
I’ve written some small statements, that’s about it though.
H UO And do you have unrealised projects?
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Islesboro Ferry Slip, 1975
H UO Then at some moment it stops.
A K
I don’t go beyond 20 feet.
H UO I suppose you have live models who come to the studio or you work outside in
the landscape but are there also moments when it’s done photographically?
A K
I took photographs for a very short period of time. We went to the same beach
for forty years. I always wanted to paint the whole beach but I could never figure
out how to do it. I started to notice that there are gestures of people on the
beach that are never repeated. And then in 2000 I asked Vivien for a camera
that a 14-year-old could use. I went down to the beach and I kept taking random
shots and I started putting them together. Then it took about two or three years.
I really got it down, and I did a great big painting of people walking on the beach,
and after that I had no interest in photography whatsoever.
H UO The camera disappeared again.
A K
It disappeared yes. I have used photos before, like for Islesboro Ferry Slip (1975).
It came from a photo of Vincent and a friend in Mont Saint-Michel. I used the
image of Vincent and swapped in another friend and it made it Islesboro in
Maine. So photos have been an inspiration, as have movie stills and movies.
I saw a Russian movie and there were a lot of people walking outdoors in the
snow, and out of that I got all those paintings of Ada outdoors in the snow.
H UO Rainer Maria Rilke, one of my favourite poets, wrote this lovely little book of
advice to a young poet. I was wondering what, today, would be your advice to
a young painter?
A K
Well, I think if you want to be a painter, you paint six hours a day, six days a week,
and then after four or five years see whether you still like it!
in two and a half hours, and it looked OK. And then Ada liked it a lot and then
Rob Storr came over and thought it was terrific. It means that I opened a new
door, so I’ll be back in landscapes.
H UO That’s exciting!
A K
It’s a little house on a lake. It’s almost what they call a camp, a weekend place
that someone lives in full time. The painting worked out and I don’t understand
it and that means I’m going to have to keep doing that. The flowers have gone
on much longer than I thought – they just keep evolving.
H UO You said that there are different steps – you sketch and then you make the bigger
drawing. Can you explain the steps?
A K
The initial thing is a sketch, just like I did in high school, except I know what
I’m doing now a little better. The first step is unconscious, then you try to figure
out what you like about it and what you don’t. If the imagery is new, sometimes
I make six or seven sketches, but other times it’s just one or two sketches, and
then I start to think what size I can make the painting. Sometimes you do it at
4 feet and then 6 feet and then you say, ‘I bet this would look good at 12 feet.’
And then you say, ‘Do you think I can make it at 20 feet?’ That’s the way it goes.
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Conversation took place in London, 2012
a microscopic gaze, but also of how this depth disappears and looks like an opaque
blotch once you step back from the canvas. This is the world as we live it, with eyes in
motion and a mind that reaches out into space or homes in on something and holds it
very close, seeking the soul in this material world.
Lived Depth
Jan Verwoert
Post-war debates around colour-field painting in New York coined terms powerful
enough to frame the work for years to come. The fact that a canvas is literally a flat
surface was held to be the truth of the medium. Measured against this standard, the
creation of visual depth would rate as an attempt to trick viewers into seeing a third
dimension where in fact there is none. Faced with the choice between truth or trickery,
what would a progressive painter do but side with facts over fiction? Yet why should
truth reside in bare fact, while depth must remain pure illusion? How listless would
life be if that were so? In this light, the philosophical edge of Katz’s paintings could be
seen to lie in how he persists in probing the materiality of the medium, while freeing
this materialist approach from literal-mindedness. His concise delivery and attention
to each mark on the canvas express his affinity to a basic critical intuition: if you
want to show what you see, keep it simple, apply Occam’s razor, and scrape away false
embellishments. But Katz doesn’t boil things down just for the sake of it, as a blind
reductionist would. Instead, he reintroduces the possibility of seeing depth in painting
based on a sense of appreciation for the many dimensions of lived everyday experience.
As Spinoza contended, there is something deeply soulful in the manner in which the
material world unfolds in its many modalities. A face has the potential to become a
landscape. Life fills with memories in a glimpse of an eye. Things are what they are.
But how can we ever be sure, as Spinoza asked, that we have fully grasped the potential
of their being? This is not so much a doubt as a declaration of love for the depth of
what touches you in life. That love is there in every mark and colour that Katz puts
on the canvas. It is the calm power with which his paintings radiate.
You may spot a house in the distance. Then you might see a face up close. In
some moments, space seems to vanish and who or what is before you is all there is.
A moment later, your eyes might travel again, as far as they can and back, attempting
to grasp where you are amidst your surroundings. Far may not be that far when the
building right across the street blocks your view, or it might be that your gaze finds its
way past trees scattered enough to let it see almost to the horizon. Halfway, however,
you might find a stream dividing the field in two, so that getting from here to over
there will lead to a pair of wet feet. With any move you make, the manner in which you
perceive the depth of the world around you can change profoundly. And this is not just
something that the muscle in your eyes has to cope with. It affects your whole body and
self. At times, reality comes rushing in. Facts hit you flat in the face. There is no depth
in a close encounter. Intense moments of love or pain, or when you simply bump your
head, tend to have a cartoonish edge to them. Ah! Ouch! Intensity renders life in 2D.
At other times, reality pulls back, more things come into view, and as you try to hold
on to what is in front of you, it recedes and turns into a memory right before your eyes.
This is life in full 3D, a deep space in which what is present and what is held in your
memory resonate with one another in the most perplexing way.
The beauty and power of Alex Katz’s paintings lies in the way in which he engages
all the different aspects of how we experience depth, both sensually and existentially.
He is not afraid to show reality in the key of that joyful flatness that one would associate
with Pop art. The outlines of a face may be rendered with a few attentively traced lines
on and around a patch of skin tones, contrasting mildly with the warm glow of the
monochrome backdrop from which it is separated by a wave of hair. This is how it is
when the face of the person before you fills your field of vision, and the horizon of your
senses is coloured by the immediate bodily presence of another living being. Yet Katz
won’t remain solely in this mode. He will equally enter all other dimensions available
to painting. Beyond what is given in the immediate foreground, he may carefully hint
at the possibilities of space widening in the middle ground, so as to let a landscape, a
forest, a brook appear. At other times this space may match that between your window
and the building opposite and so just be wide enough for you to catch a glimpse of
clouds in the night sky above the roofs, illuminated by the street lights below. Like
a lung that fills with air and empties itself out between breaths, the middle ground
in some of Katz’s works appears deep at one moment, blank the next. The way he
paints the intervals between flowers, stems and petals, trees, trunks and leaves, gives
you a sense of how vast the space between little things can become when beheld by
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At the Stroke of Katz, Sharp
John Godfrey
I know air when I don’t see it
After it evacuates, confronted by light
Light makes colours of air well-acquainted
A single look and regard is complete
Mutable constituents, only once, at
say, ‘the 4 p.m. of the soul’
Is black light hot, reflection cold?
Light is a locked-on world
One does not ‘look at’ light
One does not ‘look up to’ light
Can one even think light
does not make the world ‘ours’?
Light is real because its degrees
belong only to us
Black Brook light you can read by
Fog is light’s most intimate proposition
Background is the middle earth of light
Is it a boundless guayaba sky?
Wall of the universe?
Time without portfolio?
Daylight strokes on, night light strips
Sky is a has-been light out of the frame
a survival game within it
Air eats light where birdies fly
but the Katz eye is highhanded when
light is becoming to matter
Night is light neat, reflection on the side
Basic black has no modesty
Reflections: Rorschachs of light
Skin is the unstable home among lights
Light comes from the outside of skin
Is a woman a vessel of lit air?
Lightly touch, all-over at once
transitional without detail
This light does not caress or desire
It’s autonomous and demanding
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Makes in-between light
incubate a cheek
Talking about Katz
Marlene Dumas & Jan Andriesse
MARLE NE DUMA S When we met in the early 1980s, you liked Katz and I didn’t really like Katz – the
work, that is. Europe wasn’t a very Katz-friendly place at that time. In Holland, no
museums showed Katz. And you have to see Katz to get Katz. Without the colour
and the scale, it ain’t Katz.
MD I never got to see that, but by now I have seen many a beautiful Katz. Although
I still wonder if these secular encounters consisting of his immaculately made
models are really portraits.
JA Of course they are.
MD I have to admit that when I saw the exhibition, Alex Katz Paints Ada in 2006 in the
Jewish Museum in New York, I was very moved. She, his Nefertiti, his Egyptian
Queen, ain’t just anybody. Lately, I’ve realised that my obsession with the fall of
man isn’t the only way to go about things. Not that the neutrality of Katz’s images
shows indifference. It is aggressive. Yes, Katz is clean, but clean like the Mafia at
a baptism.
JAN A NDRIE SSE The first book you ever gave me was Monasteries of the World and the second was
a catalogue of Alex Katz. In it you wrote: ‘Some-body has to have this.’
MD The first sentence you underlined was a quote by Katz himself: ‘I’m still involved
with light – an absolute present-tense light …’ You taught me to see the light and
radiance of Katz, where I’d only seen it as hard, like plastic but not like Pop art,
which is a different kind of nice, even though it’s hard-edged too.
JA You see, this is part of the misunderstanding: his edges aren’t hard. Because he
works wet in wet, the edges are soft.
MD Oops!
JA Some things are simple. My Katz is: it’s 1974. I’m twenty-four years old, living
in Montreal, trying to make a painting. It’s winter. Winters in Canada are cold
and dark and very, very long. I went into a gallery – no-one had whispered a
thing – and there out of the blue was this large painting of a longhaired dog and a
longhaired girl. Two monumental pyramids. Along the upper edge were two green
horizontal rectangles evoking grass, a window. The dog had one all-seeing eye
and the paint was fresh and immediate and the light was amazingly clear and
even. Nothing can take away that encounter.
MD You told me how nice it was that this work said ‘I love my wife, my son, my dog ….’
JA The second encounter was very different, but just as wonderful: the colossal frieze
on Times Square in NYC, filled with beautiful portraits of women. He was inspired
by billboards. Now he painted on a billboard, but it wasn’t a billboard at all.
It was a painting – a painting that took on the sleaze and the visual overload
of 42nd Street with ease.
Conversation took place in Amsterdam, 2016
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Nine Women, 1977, mural, Times Square, New York