-
Initiated at the invitation of its chief curator Jacopo Crivelli, Alex Katz: Soup to Nuts started out as a project for the 34th Sao Paulo scheduled to open in September 2020. Katz was to have been a featured artist presented in the main exhibition in the Oscar Niemeyer Pavilions of the Parque Ibirapuera, with an ancillary retrospective – for Katz his first in South America – hosted by Paulo Miyada at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The original checklist numbered around 100 works in all the formats and media Katz has utilized since the beginning of his career in the early 1950s. Although it can't possibly cover the same ground in any detail, this synoptic – "haiku" – version of that more expansive and comprehensive survey spans the same seventy year trajectory and touches on his key subjects – family, friends, fellow artists, poets, dancers, landscapes, cityscapes – collectively portraying the evolution of the "good life" in a cosmopolitan United States during the years of that country's greatest prosperity. As keen an observer of fashion in the streets and lofts of Manhattan as of the flora and fauna of his second home in rural Maine, Katz is a quintessentially Baudelarian artist, a spontaneous Manet-like realist when it comes to both the social and the natural world, a complete North American "Painter of Modern Life." As such this show of [30 paintings] may fairly be regarded as a Katz feast "from soup to nuts." — Robert Storr (Brooklyn, New York, September 2020)
"A lot of people want to paint something timeless, but I paint the immediate present." — Alex Katz
"Everything is moving. There’s no reality, it’s moving. Reality is subject to fashion and so you get something where there’s no past tense, there’s no future tense, there’s only now. And I want to paint the now. That’s the immediate present. And that’s what consciousness is." — Alex Katz
"I’m working on something that painters have never done before. I’m trying to see something and make other people see what I saw. That’s it. And the portraits go into a social thing, too, because I’m painting the society in which I live. So it has that social identification, but it’s also pretty optical. I’m just trying to paint what I’m looking at." — Alex Katz
To the Harbormaster
I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
— Frank O’Hara
(Photo: Alex Katz studio in Maine, 1997)
"My life [in the 1940s and 50s] was basketball, dancing and painting." — Alex Katz
