Tucked amid the winding roads and lush woods of Lincolnville, Maine, lies Alex Katz’s surprisingly rustic cottage. In the middle of a new paint job, the facade boasts an almost garish yellow hue reminiscent of a sunflower at the height of its bloom—a veritable sore thumb in the midst of the picturesque colonial homes in the bucolic surroundings. As one of America’s foremost artists, a man renowned as a colorist, the shade is either a total surprise or completely obvious. “The neighbors don’t really like it,” muses Katz as he surveys the work.
Unperturbed, the painter, dressed simply in a white T-shirt and slim khaki shorts, pads barefoot into his longtime summer home, pointing out the various renovations he’s made over the 50-odd years he’s owned it. With its crooked floors, slanted ceilings, worn antiques and uneven walls painted in dusty pinks and yellows, those aesthetes who prefer the sleek designs of Richard Meier might find it modest to a fault.
But the house plays into the low-key lifestyle the artist and his wife of almost five decades, Ada, firmly espouse—up to a point. Trailing Katz to his studio that overlooks Coleman Pond, one is surprised to find a rather slickly constructed edifice—all big windows and great light. Clearly, when it comes to his working environs, Katz doesn’t settle for rustic.
A group of four newly painted canvases lines one wall—one of Ada, one of a woman on the beach with a baseball cap on, a dark landscape and an outsized woman’s face. “She was painting the house and I just asked her if she would sit for me,” he explains simply. All display what Katz himself calls his “high style,” color-choked renderings in which fashion plays a key role.
Katz won’t immortalize just anyone on canvas, though. He must be inspired by them. Over the years, his subjects have ranged from his family, his friends, fellow artists to the more democratic choices of, for instance, his neighbor on the pond. But of all of his subjects, it is his wife Ada whom he has continually found the most captivating. So much so, that a selection of nearly 40 of these paintings will be on display at The Jewish Museum come Oct. 27 when the exhibit, Alex Katz Paints Ada, 1957-2005, opens to the public.
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To hear Katz talk about his wife, as he does in almost hallowed terms, it’s no surprise she’s continued to fascinate him for nearly half a century. “She understood John Ashbery before I did,” he says. “She got Beckett before most of the poets did, she was really out there. Smart and a good dancer, and she has almost perfect taste in everything.”
The two met at an art opening in Greenwich Village in 1957 and Katz’s interest was almost immediately piqued. “She was like a myth already,” says Katz, who was introduced to Ada through two of his artist friends. “These guy were real ladies’ men and they said, separately, that they’d met this very interesting girl. They never said that about anyone else. Obviously because they’d met a girl they couldn’t connect with. And I said, ‘Well, I’m on a different wavelength, I bet I can.'” And he did. “She wanted a very particular thing. There were probably three guys in New York that had it, and I think the other two lived in Staten Island.”
A biologist who graduated from college at 19, Ada was no sycophantic, boho, hippie chick. And the fierce intellectual became equally smitten with Katz. After drinks at the Chuckwagon, a Billie Holiday concert, several parties and a Lindy hop, their fate was sealed. “I danced with her and that was it,” says Katz with his characteristic poetic bluntness. “She was a fantastic social dancer. She could make any guy feel good.”
Over the course of their marriage, Katz has painted Ada in countless social and cultural roles: as wife, mother (they have one son, Vincent, 46), friend, style icon, everywoman. He’s painted her at the beach, in a canoe, at sophisticated loft parties and paid meticulous detail to everything from the vivid floral print of her bathing robe to her cap of ebony hair shot with gray. “There is something that goes beyond the cool formalism of his work. It’s sort of an enduring admiration,” says Ruth Beesch, deputy director at the Jewish Museum, who curated the show. “It’s a recognition of her style and how she represents for him and can for all of us, this woman of the last half of the 20th century.” Beesch sifted through dozens of Ada paintings to find a compelling assortment of pieces that have a chronological span, along with a sociological resonance.
“I looked for a range of work from representations of Ada as sort of a solitary, almost existential figure to a participant in the family-and-friends narrative that gets played out over the years in Alex’s work.”
Indeed, even Ada—whom Katz refers to as a bit of a recluse, saying, “She’d rather read a book than see a person”—acknowledges the dynamism of the work that features her.
“When I see the portraits of me, I realize Alex is a powerful and versatile artist,” she says. “And that we must have a good marriage!”
The late art historian Sir Lawrence Gowing referred to Ada as Katz’s Cézanne mountain—his Mont Sainte-Victoire, if you will.
And as the mountain became more than a mountain in Cézanne’s hands, Katz similarly illuminates his wife, and his other subjects. As close friend, art producer and frequent muse, Yvonne Force Villareal, put its, “He empowers people during these painting sessions. There’s a sense of the profound way he can look into one’s life… and it’s almost sealed into the painting in an interesting way.”
Yet Katz has been faulted by some for a lack of substance in his art. As the late critic John Bernard Myers told The New York Times: “I’ve always found his work very shallow and commercial. It’s like toothpaste ads, with their simplistic color and immediately recognizable imagery.” But, as is typical, Katz remains unruffled. “It’s very difficult to capture the surface of what you are looking at. To really see something is, I think, really hard. To tell a story of some tragedy is kind of simple to do and that’s not very interesting to me.”
Katz, for his part, remains a bit of an anomaly. At 79, when others would be content to settle into the autumn of their lives, he cuts a lithe figure (he swims and jogs every day), his interests are vast, his sense of humor razor sharp, his conversation easily fascinating. He’s a portraitist who forgets faces, an artist who dismisses subtext and he’s having a renaissance.
With two other upcoming exhibitions featuring his work (at The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan, in October and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in February), the painter remains as prolific as ever—always working on the next thing. “I feel compelled to paint,” says Katz, looking out at the still, silent pond and the towering trees beyond.
“If I don’t paint, what am I going to do? Chop wood?”
This article appeared in WWD Scoop, a special publication to WWD available to subscribers.