Vision
All art © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Alex Katz, Grey Day, 1990, oil on linen, collection of Allen and Joan Bildner.
Like La Boheme
By Jerry Tallmer
The literature on Alex Katz is heavily salted with references to Manet, Matisse, Vuillard, Bonard, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, etc., etc., and any fool can plainly see that Katz learned how to crop a photo – excuse it, a painting – from Edgar Degas. Or maybe he learned that from painter and critic Manny Farber, who once upon a time taught me about Degas and the edges of the painting that, just like a viewfinder’s frame, or a movie frame, can slice a person or a scene in half, in thirds, or whatever, and throw the residue away.
Be that as it may, there is now (to March 1, 2007) an exhibit at New York’s Jewish Museum which is not so much about where art comes from as it is about two human beings, Alex Katz from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and Ada Del Moro from the Bronx, who met in 1957, married in 1958 -- and he has been painting her ever since.
All art © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
The Black Dress, 1960, oil on linen, Brandhorst Collection.
“Like La Boheme,” said Alex Katz, wryly – wry is his middle name – over the phone early one morning from SoHo, where he has lived and worked since 1968. “I met her and within two weeks was painting her. She’d come to see a two-man collage show at the Tanager Gallery – yes, the old Tanager on 10th Street. I was one of the two men. She knew the other guy, Tom Boutis. That was when I was living on 28th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. The furriers had gone out of business and the artists had moved in.”
The spread at the Jewish Museum is billed as Alex Katz Paints Ada, and so is the handsome and helpful 116-page, $39.95 catalogue from Yale University Press. On the walls are 34 paintings of Ada ranging chronologically from the small, sketchy, arms-crossed, ingénue-ish “Ada in Black Sweater” of 1957 to the very large (4 feet high, 8 feet wide) “Ada” of 2005, cropped close top and bottom, a face as beautiful as ever, more beautiful than ever, lost in thought, eyes mirroring experience, hair streaked with gray. Yeats had his Maud Gonne (“but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you”). Katz has his Ada. Well, let’s not overstate the case. Let the paintings make that case.
Red Coat, 1982, oil on linen, courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Of all the portraits here, none is more serenely dazzling than the quizzical Ada of “Blue Hat” (2003, oil on linen, 6’ x 5’) that’s on the front jacket of the catalogue in slightly stronger colors (printer’s ink) than the painting itself. The eyes of the woman in “Blue Hat” look directly, openly, into our own. She is about to say something – or maybe not. She’s thinking something, that’s for sure. Who are all those gilded movie stars she brings to mind in this and a number of other paintings? Joan Crawford? Anne Bancroft? Jennifer Jones? Jeanne Moreau? – or all of them rolled into one?
In the distance behind the Ada of “Blue Hat” we discern a low, dark, horizontal shoreline, and to the right -- that is to say, far off in the body of water beyond her left shoulder -- there are three tiny barely detectable sailboats. Was this, then, painted at seaside, at lakeside?
“It was done here in New York City,” said Katz, no less wryly than before. “She’s standing in front of another painting. I thought it kind of nice and romantic.”
From the first painting onward, the 1957 “Black Sweater,” he was, he says, working with – struggling with, one imagines -- “different formal ideas. I’d decided to go for flat backgrounds, quite a new thing then that got a lot of response. Then large heads. Then group compositions.”
In interviews of the past he has often applied the word allegory to one picture or another. Meaning? “Just that some kind of a story is going on.”
A story which is not necessarily on the canvas?
“It’s not explicit, no.”
The very large scale of most of the works on these walls is in fact what first knocks you out. Again, it’s like the movies -- the Big Screen. I don’t want to push this nonsense too far, but if you can’t have fantasies about sleeping with somebody you see up there on that Big Screen – even somebody as carefully, coolly dispassionate as Katz’s Ada -- what can you have fantasies about?
There was once a whole other Ada Del Moro not to be found anywhere in these pictures. “When we met,” says her husband, “she was a biologist working 60 hours a week at Sloan-Kettering – on her way to being Mme. Curie. There’s something in cancer called the mouse tumor. She discovered it. They’re still using what she found.”
In one very, very large painting, the 12-foot-wide “Walk” of 1979. a barefoot young boy in a bathing suit, his back to us as he walks down a path of planks toward a summer house, is framed by Ada in huge profile to our left and — his back to us — a skinny-ish T-shirted male with longish black hair to our right: Alex Katz by Alex Katz. The barefoot young boy is Vincent Katz, now 46, ID’d by his father as “a poet and art critic” who lives on 10th Street.
Alex Katz was born July 24, 1927, in Brooklyn. His mother had been an actor on the Yiddish stage under the name Ella Marion. Alex never saw her perform. Was his father “a gambler,” as one had read? “Nahhh. He had gambled for a couple of years, but he wasn’t a gambler. He played billiards and chased girls. Then he came here, worked in a sweatshop, and finally went into the coffee business for himself. He died when I was 16. My mother died 10 or 15 years ago.”
Son Akex came out of the Navy, studied at Cooper Union, then at the Skowhegan (Maine) School of Painting and Sculpture. His first solo exhibition in New York was at the Roko Gallery on Greenwich Avenue in the Village.
No, Alex Katz does not work from photographs. Not ever, he said. Ada Del Moro Katz poses for everything.
How many paintings does he reckon to have done of her in all? “I have no idea. Somebody said more than 250.”
What proportion of his entire body of work -- much of it depictions of artists, writers, and other friends -- has gone toward portraits of Ada?
“I have no idea. But it’s not half and half.”
Does his model ever lose patience?
“Oh no. She’s a real sport. It’s not all fun for her. Sometimes it’s too hot. Sometimes it’s too cold. Sometimes something hurts.”
Does she ever say the hell with it? – the hell with all this?
“Oh no.”
But from what I read, she does have something to say about the work in progress.
“Not too much. Sometimes something funny. But she’s pretty dedicated. She sees it as my painting rather than just a picture of her.”
last painting in the show and the catalogue is dated 2005. Is that the last he’ll ever do of her?
“I have no idea.” Pause. “Most likely not.”
Is there any bounce between these portraits and his other work?
“I don’t know. Right now I’m at work on a painting of four women. Ada is one of them.”
So he hasn’t stopped. I wouldn’t bet that he ever will.
ALEX KATZ PAINTS ADA. Curated by Ruth Beesch. At the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3200, through March 18, 2007.
