Alex Katz: The Simplicity of Complexity

“I like to be pleasant and simple,” says Alex Katz, succinctly capturing his artistic essence.  Despite some critics and historians challenging the relevance of biography in art, arguing that art should transcend personal stories in favor of theory and systematized ideas, Katz offers a contrasting view. He sees art as an organic collection of starts, stops, and events—a habit nurtured over time, transforming into talent that feels both innate and perpetually fresh with each engagement.

For many, art is inherently biographical, with the artist’s circle—patrons, critics, lovers, family—often weaving their way into the work, sometimes without intention. However, in Katz’s work, this integration is a deliberate act of inspiration.

Reflecting on Katz’s evolution, we observe a shift from intimate close-ups in the ’60s and ’70s to broader scenes of couples or groups in later decades. His style, unmistakably his own, defies the expectations of Realism with its unique elegance. A prime example is “Ace Airport” (1998), which epitomizes Katz’s modern, elegant approach—an airport scene where specifics are secondary to the relaxed atmosphere of the subjects, encapsulating modern life where technology and humanity intersect seamlessly.

Katz works with the diligence of an observer, capturing the subtleties of daily life that others might overlook. Unlike the Abstract Expressionists, such as Monet and Matisse who used action painting to explore paint’s physical properties, Katz’s action is in the act of looking, finding inspiration, and then conveying those observations through his art.

Though a contemporary of many of the Ab Ex painters, Katz’s choice for himself was not in alignment with the New York School but instead he followed a more personal, autobiographic in many ways, exploration that began with drawing and ended with first small scale works and gradually grew to monumental paintings on the scale of the great 18th and 19th century Salon masters.

His painting style, refined and limited in color and texture, emerged as a counterpoint to the abundance of paint characteristic of his era. While many of his contemporaries delved into the exploration of their psyche and emotional temperaments, Katz drew inspiration from his immediate surroundings—his son Vincent and wife Ada to his illustrious friends including poets, art world figures and dancers to self-portraits, echoing the traditions of artists like Degas, Bonnard, and Picasso, who also turned to their personal lives for subject matter.

For Katz, familiar faces become well regarded portraits, private lives made public and visible through wonderfully mastered paintings that, like all of Katz’s work, are simple, refined and well meted out a balance of color and form. These portraits can be singular or collective where the subject appears multiple times such as The Black Jacket 1972 or a gang of portraits called Men in White Shirts from 2005 and most recently a silkscreen print portfolio called Black Dress comprises nine vertical prints each an image of a women dressed in the classic little black dress. Katz takes the portrait and expands it as repertoire piece something that can be explored, restated, or redefined.

Married in 1958, Ada Katz became an important part of Katz’s oeuvre appearing in dozens of canvases, prints and the artist’s unique cut outs. To honor this unique partnership the Jewish Museum mounted an exhibition in 2006, Alex Katz Paints Ada. Among the essayists the art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway whose 1981 essay, The Constant Muse, explores not only who Ada was as a physical model and presence but that over time she represents the shifts in Katz’s style from a loose painterly representation to one more linear and defined. Times change and of course Ada changes, fashion changes, locales change…Ada is both a constant in Katz’s life and an extraordinary measure of those changes over the course of several decades.

Portraits are Katz’s life work: profiles, three quarters views, close ups. Each is a study of the shape structure and form of the sitter’s face, generally broad contrasts of tones with few highlights. It is less about who that sitter is and more about how that sitter appears as a model of their best self.

Many friends and associates have also been an influence on who and what Katz paints. The long list includes poets, writers, curators, dancers, and other artists: Kenneth Koch, Edwin Denby, Frank O’Hara all played an important role in Katz’s development as a painter and a thinker. But Katz was closest to Allen Ginsburg, the Beat poet and author of Kaddish. Ginsburg was also a champion of individual liberation. Katz also applied the notion of personal liberation to his art, expanding what he imagined figurative painting to be. He enlarged the physical size and field of the painting. Compositionally, he multiplied or repeated figures or he cropped them in such a way that the tension between form and field held the viewer’s attention immediately. And in an entirely separate body of work, he created free standing painted cut outs. These figures now existed in the same space as the viewer much like a prop on the stage. The theater here being the real world.

Over the years Katz has transformed small oil studies and easel size paintings into large canvases and murals. The horizontal nature of his canvases exaggerates the idea of “cinema“ and “modernity.“ Ed Ruscha has used a similar format and both artists employ this structure to explain place or scene where their canvas needs to say less, show less, but impact more. It’s hard enough for Katz to represent the world but rather than fill it up endlessly with seemingly infinite quantity of details that abound, the emphasis remains on the figures or subjects themselves that are demonstrating the narrative within each painting. In Ace Airport, two figures and the fragment of an airplane are against a panorama of a sky…this concept of simplicity and classical restraint remains important to Katz over the past many years.

For all the faces, heads, portraits and figures he has depicted over the years he is not representing the character of relationships or the psychology of the sitter good, bad, or otherwise. There is no psychological turmoil in these works, he has left that to others, Alfred Leslie for example. Instead, Katz simply paints what he sees, what he finds before him without any editorial comments other than those that affect the shape, the pose and the placement of his figures and the setting itself. Perhaps this is the reason many consider him a Pop artist? Is it that somehow without a strong emotional predicament at play, he is simply a prankster playing with the world and making it all light and breezy? One cannot read Katz as cynical or camp or critical in his attitude the way you might approach and respond to Warhol or Lichtenstein. Both of those artists are re-using an inventory of culturally derived images whether from the world of the media or advertising and pushing those images into the world of art.  Far from the ideas of Pop art to quote Katz: “I’d like to make an image that is so simple you can’t avoid it and so complicated you can’t figure it out.” Katz is more philosophical about his ambitions; his views are that of a painter who thinks through his paintings like an Old Master and wants to finish them like a great Modernist.

Among Katz’s most successful themes are groups of people starting with a 1965 painting called The Cocktail Party. It is a contemporary scene, an event in a loft, drinks in everyone’s hands and cigarettes. The windows that function as a backdrop to the crowd of figures open to a view of New York City at night. The interplay of figures, the night environs, and even the palette would follow in the next decade continuing the theme of groups: February 5:30 PM, 1972; Thursday Night 2, 1974 or Round Hill, 1977 in the LA County Museum of Art’s collection.

Katz is deliberately more inventive in his way; weaving colors and flat forms to create the scene and atmosphere of his downtown party, a sequence of color silhouettes set against a backdrop of dark city. His guests are close together, intimate and enjoying the mood and the celebratory event.

Katz has two more important themes in his repertoire: the city and the country. Born and raised in the city, his love for the city comes through in pictures of the city at night when it becomes a more mysterious realm. His series which began in the 80s, Night Paintings sees the city as a pattern of windows and lights as one continuous abstract spectrum of grids and angles that has its source in the background of The Cocktail Party. There is a stillness about these works as if the city has been abandoned but the lights remain turned. No individuals or groups of people, just silence. These are among the most atmospheric of Katz’s works where the city exists in the most abstract manner shrouded in darkness.

Katz’s repertoire includes themes of social gatherings, cityscapes, and the natural world, each explored through his distinctive lens. Whether capturing the vibrant life of the city or the serene beauty of the countryside, Katz’s work is a testament to his ability to abstract and simplify his subjects, emphasizing their inherent narrative.

As Katz continues to explore and expand his themes well into his 80s, his dedication to his craft underscores the need for a comprehensive retrospective to fully appreciate the breadth and depth of his artistic journey. Such an exhibition would not only celebrate Katz’s contributions to art but also secure his place as a pivotal figure in the 21st century’s artistic landscape.