Alex Katz

at the New York State Museum

by Sparrow, June 20, 2007

Alex Katz: Selections from the Whitney Museum, at the New York State Museum (in Albany, New York)

First of all, I believe Alex Katz's portraits are actual portraits.  They are not "Pop Art", or controlled abstractions which happen to resemble people.  They are real people.  The Ada paintings are about love: the particular genre of married love.  You consider your "wife" -- some person you met at a party or a fruitstand and are now stuck with "forever" -- and you experience the limitation of personality.  She is a human being, like you yourself are.  How could you possibly have thought that two fucked-up people would be happier than one?  And why did she agree with you?  What is "love"?  Does it really exist?  Is it entirely a pathological error?

And yet, at moments, you look at her -- when she is not even quite facing you, in the kitchen -- and she is gratifyingly stunning.  Your own wife!  Something in her eyes surprises you, the poet-as-watcher.

Many of Alex's paintings involve poets.  I've seen his portraits of Frank O'Hara and Ted Berrigan.  In this show, there's a painting of Edwin Denby.  Denby was dance critic for the New York Herald Tribune from 1942 to 1945.  I read one of his collections: Dancers, Buildings and People in the Street (New York, 1965), plus his innovative sonnets in Collected Poems (Full Court Press, New York, 1975).  Over and over, I studied Denby's poems, until many pages fell out of the book.  Now my Collected Poems looks like a bundle of paper.

Here is an untitled Denby sonnet:

Friends smiling step out through the door
Diminish shouts of the party
Home single undress or by pairs
Asleep lose their identities
Senseless abed, no problems, friends
Both ways, a third too, hours of work
Daily the intense absence ends
Buoyant friends daily lurk apart
Among strangers most of life laid
Like at night's trembling spaces you peer

One rooming house still bulb-lit shade
Maybe print, maybe cans of beer
Subway or street, glances smiling
Move close, turn aside, beguiling

"I don't like the portrait of Denby," my friend Tom said, as we walked through the show.  "He looks so angry!"

Later, thinking about this portrait, I realized: "Denby was always honest.  He'd want an honest painting."

Alex Katz never became a single word, like "Rothko" or "Pollock."  One would not say, "I went to the Katz show" -- partly because it sounds like the International Cat Show.  "Alex" remains part of Katz's name, which is fitting, as he is a first-name artist.  His muse, Ada, is always "Ada" in the titles, and so is "Eli" (a 1963 painting on the cover of this show's booklet).

Now that Ada is no longer young, or is even perhaps "old," the paintings of her change meaning.  They become paintings of memory.  But of course, they always were.  In 1965, they were just briefer memories.  But there is more than a series of fond moments here.  As the paintings age, they grow somehow sacred.  The portraits of Ada show the sanctity of marital devotion.

If their import is religious, their method is psychological.  One of Alex's themes is how androgynous faces are.  There is something hard in a female mouth, something soft in a male one.  This is gay art for heterosexuals.

Through August 19.

http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/exhibits/special/AlexKatz.cfm