On David Salle's Excellent "Follow the Light"

Alexx Katz, Sharon and Vivian (2009)

It’s early yet, but already there's an essay out that will surely be considered one of 2024’s best. I’m referring to David Salle’s wonderful “Follow the Light” (The New York Review of Books, January 18, 2024). It’s a review of Alex Katz: Gathering, an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City, October 21, 2022 – February 20, 2023. Salle loved the show. He writes,

As you made your way up the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp, it was one goddamned masterpiece after another, triumphs of point of view, of touch and color and composition. Of image. Of style.

Salle analyzes that style as follows: 

Katz took the conventions of realism and merged them with the flatness and scale associated with Pop Art. Unlike his Pop contemporaries, he eschewed the black outline of cartooning. His subject is not the mediated imagery of advertising but things seen in the here and now.

This view of Katz’s art as a merger of realism and Pop appeals to me much more than the view that it’s straight realism. To me, Katz’s images lack the specificity that is characteristic of great realist painting. Too many details are left out. They’re more Pop than realist. 

Katz is a great colorist. It’s that aspect of his art that I relish most. Salle appreciates it acutely. Consider his description of Katz’s Sharon and Vivian (2009):

There are maybe twelve or thirteen distinct colors, some blended a bit to make secondary tones. A good 80 percent of the painting is covered by five colors that are close together on the spectrum: mustard yellow, pink, peach, orange, light brown. The painting creates an atmosphere of golden, enveloping warmth, tempered by the women’s detached stares: warm plus cool. Against the large expanse of yellow, the tiny quantities of blue—the cobalt irises of one, a patch of ultramarine dress with pale blue figures in it, a blue-black dress strap—work like visual punctuation. A few reddish highlights backed by some umber shadows in the light brown hair mark the middle darks, and the enormous, nearly solid black of the sunglasses is like a tuba or bassoon giving heft to the oboes and French horns that carry the melody. The painting is jaunty, forthright, witty, highly musical, and unhedged; it’s matter-of-fact and stringent at the same time.

That “Against the large expanse of yellow, the tiny quantities of blue—the cobalt irises of one, a patch of ultramarine dress with pale blue figures in it, a blue-black dress strap—work like visual punctuation” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Something Salle says in “Follow the Light” that I don’t quite agree with: “The people who appear in Katz’s paintings attest to his lifelong commitment to poetry and modern dance, and to a sophistication that has nothing to do with fashion or money.” I don’t know about that. Katz’s people seem pretty damn well-off to me. I’m not the only one who thinks this. Julian Bell, in his “In Margate: Alex Katz” (London Review of Books, November 8, 2012), refers to “Katz’s swift, slick images of wealthy Brooklynites on holiday in Maine.” He sees Katz’s paintings as, among other things, an “affirmation of moneyed style.”