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 enormously. 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.”  

November 7, 2022 Issue

Am I the only one who finds Alex Katz’s paintings shallow? Andrea K. Scott, in this week’s issue, says of him, 

His sharp eye for fashion (a chic red lip, a patterned scarf, a snazzy pair of sandals) can be deceptive. Such details are to Katz what apples were to Cézanne (whom Katz has called “the first artist I understood”): an invitation to eye the interplay of color and light, load a brush with oil, and master the depths of a painting’s surface. [“In the Museums”]

Details? Katz’s paintings have no details, no specificity. They’re massive simplifications. His figures have the blank look of mannequins. 

Depth? That’s a laugh. There is no depth in a Katz picture. It’s all surface. Katz is a master of superficiality. 

August 27, 2018 Issue

Calvin Tomkins, in his absorbing “Painterly Virtues,” a profile of painter Alex Katz, in this week’s issue, says, “Many of Katz’s best paintings capture the light and the atmosphere of a specific time of day—none more hauntingly than his 1982 image of an adolescent girl, alone, in ‘Tracy on the Raft at 7:30.’ ” I don’t know about that. The use of “specific” to describe a Katz is surprising. He’s among the least specific painters I know of. Looking at “Tracy on the Raft at 7:30,” I see an image denuded of detail. Everything in it is massively simplified: the girl in her two-piece red-and-white bathing suit looks like a mannequin; an immense swath of slate green paint represents foliage; there’s a glimpse of sage green sky; the raft is a bar of white and a bar of grey; water is a bar of slate green with sage green splotches indicating reflections of sky. It’s the title that provides the specificity, not the painting. “Tracy on the Raft at 7:30” is an abstractionist’s idea of representation. As Tomkins says, Katz’s work was never realistic. “The faces of his subjects are smooth and unblemished, almost generic, and the background details, when they exist, are minimal.”

Alex Katz, "Tracy on the Raft at 7:30" (1982)

I relish details. Katz’s pared-down style isn’t entirely to my taste. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Tomkins’s piece immensely, especially his account of watching Katz paint:

Moving deliberately, Katz climbed five steps to the top of a creaky wheeled platform and started applying ultramarine to the upper-right section of the canvas, using a housepainter’s six-inch-wide brush. The paint went on easily, in smooth, unhurried strokes, back and forth and diagonally. One of his rules is “no noodling,” which means no fussy brushwork. He came down, moved the platform a few feet to the left, and climbed up again to do the next part. Every now and then he paused to consult the smaller sketch, which he had with him on the platform, or the warmup canvas. He kept going back over the painted areas, to adjust the tone. “I’m not sure the blue is right,” he said, at one point. “We’ll see when the black comes into play.” It took him about half an hour to finish the sky. Occasionally, between trips up and down the steps, he paused to wipe up drops of paint that had fallen beyond the brown paper he’d laid on the studio’s faded but immaculate linoleum floor.

Tomkins’s recent series of artist profiles, including “Somewhere Different” (on Peter Doig), “Troubling Pictures” (on Dana Schutz), and “Into the Unknown” (on Chris Ofili), are among the most pleasurable New Yorker pieces of the last five years. “Painterly Virtues” is a wonderful addition to the collection.