ALEX KATZ

Alex Katz is one of the most innovative leaders in the return to figurative realism and representation among avant-garde artists in America and Europe today. By 1960, very early in his career, Katz had already found his original and poetic solution to the dilemma of choice between an earlier, dominant abstraction and realism by giving primacy to style over subject matter. With considerable brilliance and expressive power, Katz managed to synthesize the artistic impulses of his own era with an earlier modernism, forging elements of Abstract Expressionism with the elegant forms of Manet and Matisse, artists who also explored color and planes, who compressed volume into flatness, and yet evoked convincing weight, movement and the human personality in their paintings.
Since the seventies, in particular, Katz's paintings have drawn attention by reason of their large formats, simple reductions of form, abrupt and unexpected transitions, and for the suggestive metaphors embodied in his subject matter. The late Thomas B. Hess, a notable contemporary art critic, aptly described the social dynamics and atmosphere of his group portraits in terms of "everyday leisure life - parties, picnics, pets - as if it were a bucolic Age of Gold where everybody is youthful and it is always time for tea." Yet these rapturous, idyllic works increasingly invoke comparison with some of the most ambitious abstract painting of our time. His unique style has managed the difficult feat of reconciling realism not only with mainstream modernism but with postmodernism as well.

In the flat, billboard-style portraits and group scenes for which he is best known, painter Alex Katz emerges as a subversive cultural critic. His work is often pigeonholed as Pop Art, yet his haunting images, as Princeton art historian Hunter notes, "work just outside of consciousness . . . confronting and taunting us" even as they function effectively on an obvious level. With 110 color plates, this handsomely illustrated monograph takes a fresh, penetrating look at an artist who has fashioned his own distinctive idiom to make something dynamic and mysterious of the paradoxical exchanges between abstraction and representation. Katz, surprisingly, reveals himself as a compelling nature poet in the strangely serene Black Brook 11, the eerie, romantic Full Moon and the severe yet soothing A Tree in Winter. His figurative paintings are at once iconic and distant: as intimate as worn snapshots of old friends.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.