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拍品專文
"Those Klines and de Koonings had so much big energy; I wanted to make some that knocked them off the wall." - Alex Katz
The great American artist Alex Katz choreographs a procession of six female figures across his monumental canvas painting Springtime. Against a bright palette evocative of the titular season, these figures, each adorned in a white summer dress and straw hat, strike contrasting poses, directing their gazes straight toward the viewer. Upon closer inspection, these figures are in fact duplicated representations of only two women, their respective features portrayed from a multiplicity of angles. In this manner, Katz is able to emphasize the formal elements from his two models while contravening the essential task of portraiture—providing a record of subjective singularity—instead creating what scholar Ewa Lajer-Burcharth describes as a “paradoxical portrait” (E. Lajer-Burcharth, “Alex Katz: Abecedarium of a Style,” in K. Brinson, Alex Katz: Gathering, exh. cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2022, p. 70).
Such paradoxical portraits form what for art historian David Sylvester is the most significant category in Katz’s oeuvre, inspired by both Eastern and Western art historical traditions. The artist has cited the profound influence of Edo period woodblock master Kitagawa Utamaro while discussing his repetitive works, admiring his virtuoso compositional formatting while creating works in the Japanese visual tradition, where the same characters appear multiple times on the same sheet, representing different stages of the plot. Katz similarly draws upon a rich Western tradition of repeated figures. In a panel from Lorenzo Ghiberti’s famed bronze Gates of Paradise for the Florence Baptistry, Jacob and Esau depict the protagonists several times as the panel dictates the hagiographic narrative. However, in both Ghiberti and Utamaro’s cases, duplication serves as a narrative shorthand to indicate the progression of time, while in Katz’s case, the artist relies on the motif in order to evacuate any psychic content from his tableau. In this way, the motif functions more like how Peter Paul Rubens repeats the female form, notably in The Judgement of Paris, located in the collection of the National Gallery, London. Here, Rubens excavates the representative function of the three strikingly similar female figures—ostensibly depicting the goddesses Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite—to instead focus on depicting their forms from different perspectives.
Katz goes further than Rubens in removing his subjects from the functions of portraiture by placing them in a vague and liminal space out of accordance with the everyday. These disconnected figures unmoored in space reveal the inspiration of yet another old master painting, the great early Renaissance painter and mathematician Piero della Francesca. Katz has cited Piero’s casting of Jesus in space in the Flagellation of Christ as “one of the greatest things in Western Art,” and with Springtime, he extends Piero’s ambiguous placement of figures in space further via the removal of any backgrounds which could tether subject to illusional space. (A. Katz, quoted by D. Sylvester, “Introduction by David Sylvester,” Alex Katz Twenty Five Years of Painting from the Saatchi Collection, exh. cat., London, Saatchi Gallery, 1997, p. 13).
Spanning twelve feet in width, the impressive scale of Springtime follows from Katz’s working practice since the 1960s, when he began to emphasize large scale with his canvases. Scale, for Katz, was a way for his figurative work to compete with the energetic compositions being made by the contemporaneous Abstract Expressionists: “Those Klines and de Koonings had so much big energy; I wanted to make some that knocked them off the wall” (A. Katz, quoted in op. cit.). Large scale has since become one of the artist’s trademarks, and the current work makes full use of the scale, which emphasizes the paradoxical elements of the composition by allowing each figure to be over life size.
Springtime demonstrates the artist in full control, readdressing and evolving motifs first experimented with at the beginning of his career. Katz paints in his distinctive smooth, flattened style. A perceptive student of art history, Katz integrated elements from across cultures and periods, from the Japanese Ukiyo-e artists and old masters discussed above, to modern artists such as Cezanne, Bonnard, and Matisse. “I think of myself as a modern person and I want my painting to look that way,” he once admitted. “I think of my paintings as different from some others in that they derive a lot from modern paintings as well as from older paintings…They’re traditional because all painting belongs to the paintings before them, and they’re modernistic because they’re responsive to the immediate” (A. Katz, quoted in R. Marshall, Alex Katz, New York, 1986, p. 22). Floating amidst a variety of competing modes and ideas, Katz established a singularly individual style that continues to enchant audiences the world over.
The great American artist Alex Katz choreographs a procession of six female figures across his monumental canvas painting Springtime. Against a bright palette evocative of the titular season, these figures, each adorned in a white summer dress and straw hat, strike contrasting poses, directing their gazes straight toward the viewer. Upon closer inspection, these figures are in fact duplicated representations of only two women, their respective features portrayed from a multiplicity of angles. In this manner, Katz is able to emphasize the formal elements from his two models while contravening the essential task of portraiture—providing a record of subjective singularity—instead creating what scholar Ewa Lajer-Burcharth describes as a “paradoxical portrait” (E. Lajer-Burcharth, “Alex Katz: Abecedarium of a Style,” in K. Brinson, Alex Katz: Gathering, exh. cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2022, p. 70).
Such paradoxical portraits form what for art historian David Sylvester is the most significant category in Katz’s oeuvre, inspired by both Eastern and Western art historical traditions. The artist has cited the profound influence of Edo period woodblock master Kitagawa Utamaro while discussing his repetitive works, admiring his virtuoso compositional formatting while creating works in the Japanese visual tradition, where the same characters appear multiple times on the same sheet, representing different stages of the plot. Katz similarly draws upon a rich Western tradition of repeated figures. In a panel from Lorenzo Ghiberti’s famed bronze Gates of Paradise for the Florence Baptistry, Jacob and Esau depict the protagonists several times as the panel dictates the hagiographic narrative. However, in both Ghiberti and Utamaro’s cases, duplication serves as a narrative shorthand to indicate the progression of time, while in Katz’s case, the artist relies on the motif in order to evacuate any psychic content from his tableau. In this way, the motif functions more like how Peter Paul Rubens repeats the female form, notably in The Judgement of Paris, located in the collection of the National Gallery, London. Here, Rubens excavates the representative function of the three strikingly similar female figures—ostensibly depicting the goddesses Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite—to instead focus on depicting their forms from different perspectives.
Katz goes further than Rubens in removing his subjects from the functions of portraiture by placing them in a vague and liminal space out of accordance with the everyday. These disconnected figures unmoored in space reveal the inspiration of yet another old master painting, the great early Renaissance painter and mathematician Piero della Francesca. Katz has cited Piero’s casting of Jesus in space in the Flagellation of Christ as “one of the greatest things in Western Art,” and with Springtime, he extends Piero’s ambiguous placement of figures in space further via the removal of any backgrounds which could tether subject to illusional space. (A. Katz, quoted by D. Sylvester, “Introduction by David Sylvester,” Alex Katz Twenty Five Years of Painting from the Saatchi Collection, exh. cat., London, Saatchi Gallery, 1997, p. 13).
Spanning twelve feet in width, the impressive scale of Springtime follows from Katz’s working practice since the 1960s, when he began to emphasize large scale with his canvases. Scale, for Katz, was a way for his figurative work to compete with the energetic compositions being made by the contemporaneous Abstract Expressionists: “Those Klines and de Koonings had so much big energy; I wanted to make some that knocked them off the wall” (A. Katz, quoted in op. cit.). Large scale has since become one of the artist’s trademarks, and the current work makes full use of the scale, which emphasizes the paradoxical elements of the composition by allowing each figure to be over life size.
Springtime demonstrates the artist in full control, readdressing and evolving motifs first experimented with at the beginning of his career. Katz paints in his distinctive smooth, flattened style. A perceptive student of art history, Katz integrated elements from across cultures and periods, from the Japanese Ukiyo-e artists and old masters discussed above, to modern artists such as Cezanne, Bonnard, and Matisse. “I think of myself as a modern person and I want my painting to look that way,” he once admitted. “I think of my paintings as different from some others in that they derive a lot from modern paintings as well as from older paintings…They’re traditional because all painting belongs to the paintings before them, and they’re modernistic because they’re responsive to the immediate” (A. Katz, quoted in R. Marshall, Alex Katz, New York, 1986, p. 22). Floating amidst a variety of competing modes and ideas, Katz established a singularly individual style that continues to enchant audiences the world over.