"... a series that follows his recent 'Calvin Klein Girls' and 'Coca-Cola Girls.' The latter is a collection of blonde women in white dresses, dancing freely across cherry-red canvases and currently on view at Timothy Taylor gallery in London. Katz didn’t go to the opening. 'I’d rather stay home and paint,' he says. The thing about Alex Katz is that he never fitted in. His parents immigrated from Russia to a New York neighbourhood with just one other Jewish family; he says he was known as 'that crazy Katz kid.' When he found his style, about a decade after art school, it was also out of joint: 'I didn’t fit in with the old Realists, I didn’t fit in with the Abstract Expressionists, I didn’t fit in with Pop Art,' he says.... And while Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns introduced politics into their art, Katz painted the lake and trees around his summer home in Maine. So now, looking back, is he glad he never fitted in? 'Yeah... I think it worked out great!... I painted nice pictures in the ’50s, and people didn’t like them. So I thought, I’m going to stick a big face of my wife in your living room and it’s going to kill everything, and you’re going to have to throw out some furniture.... When I met Ada, she said something very unforgettable. She said, "You know something? You are very bright." I don’t think anyone got that about me. They knew I was bright, but not very bright.... I said, Oh. This girl’s got my number.'"
I'm reading "Artist Alex Katz: ‘I’m 91, for Chrissakes, and I’m cranking out paintings’/Over Bellinis in New York, the outsider of American art talks about screaming patrons, making masterpieces and not fitting in," a Financial Times article from November 2018 (and I checked, he's still alive).
The reason I'm reading this is that in a post this morning, I wrote about a man who's suing Madison for allegedly discriminating against him in its effort to hire a "police monitor," and I linked to an article that has a photograph of him that looks, to my eye, like an Alex Katz painting.
Blow it up 10 feet high — look! — and attach it to a museum wall.
But quite aside from that initial reason for my looking for Alex Katz, that 2018 article is just completely wonderful.
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Prosecco and peach puree sounds better than orange juice and champagne. Live, live, live!
So I thought, I’m going to stick a big face of my wife in your living room and it’s going to kill everything, and you’re going to have to throw out some furniture....
Katz is playing here but I get a kick out of the artist contempt for patrons consuming their work for interior decoration. What the fuck else do you think they want to do with it?
Thanks for introducing me to Alex Katz----I've been looking at his paintings this morning. Luminous !
That Alex Katz article is brining me to life this morning. Can’t help but feel a strange combination of envy + kinship about his attitude.
I’ve spent the week reorganizing my workspace so I can start painting again. It’s been too long.
Katz is playing here but I get a kick out of the artist contempt for patrons consuming their work for interior decoration. What the fuck else do you think they want to do with it?
Ha ha ha. That was a funny scene in Hannah and Her Sisters.
Okay, The Black Dress is awesome.
I really like this dog.
Apparently, Katz paints great dogs. Thanks Althouse!
Some Katz dogs:
scruffy dog
dog at duck trap
Dog
His stuff's very good and surprisingly affordable.
Today.
Wow, I love that golden retriever! If it is a golden, could be several breeds I guess. Beautiful. That's a powerful painting. Not sure why it affects me like it does.
Monet's my favorite artist, and this is my favorite work.
The dog on the beach reminds me of Monet. There's an impressionist quality that really works for me.
For somebody non-political, he had one of the best ever descriptions of Trump:
“To Europeans, Trump is some kind of crazy obscenity. To someone from Queens, he’s like one of my neighbours. His reasoning is all sort of Queens, like a Queens Republican — nice and pragmatic. You can understand it. If he doesn’t accept something, he gives a reason for it. So it doesn’t vacillate.”
Trump had simple reasons for what he promised to do, and seemed to try to do them. Like a (attributed?) quote by Putin:
"They say Trump is playing 3-d chess. He's playing checkers!"
If you play checkers against somebody playing chess, you can probably make lots of jumps - and they can never checkmate you.
Wow, I just finished the interview. And there was this at the bottom...
"You know, when I was about 16, my father told me, ‘Don’t paint the details, paint the impression of what you see. And paint your own backyard.’ Boom! So that’s exactly what I did.”
Isn't that funny? An off-hand comment from his father, and he discovers the Impressionist school. Then, years later, he does a painting of a dog on a beach. And I'm like, "Man, that reminds me of Monet."
When he found his style, about a decade after art school, it was also out of joint: 'I didn’t fit in with the old Realists, I didn’t fit in with the Abstract Expressionists, I didn’t fit in with Pop Art,' he says.
But he totally fits in with the Impressionists. And I've never understood why artists have abandoned Impressionism as an art form. I'd love to see more artists pursuing that style.
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