Alex Katz, “one of the most singular painters in American art,” had to find his own way, Katz, a 95-year old New York City native who was a rough contemporary of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, was never part of any hot movement or in crowd. From early on, “he wanted to paint representationally in a contemporary way, open to the smooth aesthetics of movies, advertising billboards, and the latest fashions.” What he took from the canvases of the postwar art world’s stars was an “allover energy and materiality,” and he has never lost it. There was reason to worry that his oversize paintings might suffer when displayed in the low-ceilinged bays of the Guggenheim’s famous central spiral. But the 154 works in the museum’s remarkable retrospective were selected and hung in a way that “takes full advantage of what the spiral does best.” It helps tell a story about a singular artistic sensibility feeling its way to greatness and “maintaining momentum over time.”
The show also feels “uncannily of the moment,” Katz’s portraits and bold distillations of nature have rarely jibed with art world trends, but “what goes around comes around.” In 2022, his “astute reading of individuals within social settings and his savvy use of old-fashioned paint suddenly looks central to the conversation”— so much so that you might think every hot figurative painter today is a Katz acolyte. Echoing the buzz of the cocktail parties in his early paintings, the show moves at a brisk pace. Katz’s works “pop off the walls like old flames emerging from crowded kitchens: kiss-kiss, how lovely, what a surprise!” And as heartfelt as his portraits can be, they are often funny as well. “When Katz treats his wife, Ada, or his friends as replicable units, as if they were Warhol soup cans, the effect is inevitably comic.”
In every Katz portrait, “flatness and flash are the main attractions,” “It is clear that he is an imagemaker, perhaps even more than he is a painter,” but “trying to parse what lies beneath his artistic practice can be challenging.” He may have been a pioneer in embracing advertising’s surface-deep appeal and applying it to portraits of individuals he loves, but the effect grows tiresome. The show culminates, though, in “a curiously somber and affecting coda”: a final gallery that shows the artist “almost fully receding” from portraiture, and instead rendering the effects of snow, or water, or natural light. Only one person appears among the last gallery’s works: his wife, now silver-haired, in Ada’s Back 2 (2021). “Even when leaving the image behind, Katz can’t help but have Ada there.”
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