Alex Katz Explains His Idea of Painting Eternity A Seasoned Eye

By Prudence Peiffer

On a recent warm morning, my colleague Naeem Douglas and I visited Alex Katz in his downtown New York City studio, just days before he decamped to Maine for the summer. Katz was up on a rolling ladder painting when we first arrived, and he finished applying a dark brown coat of paint before climbing down to say hello. A stack of wooden frames awaiting canvas rested against the wall nearby. There was a palpable, almost feverish energy around the work that needed to be done. (Asked about his current routine, Katz replied that it was just “paint and sleep” with a laugh. He turns 97 this month.) On the occasion of a group of his monumental Seasons paintings going on view in MoMA’s atrium this summer, we spoke about making art for eight decades; his idea of eternity; a favorite line from his friend, the poet Frank O’Hara, which he took as inspiration; and what makes a painting a “dog” or a thing of indescribable elegance. He needs his paintings, Katz explained, to have “the feeling I have when I see things.” As Naeem and I emerged from the studio onto a busy sidewalk, we looked up at some trees in full bloom, trying to figure out which had been the model for the artist’s Winter painting at MoMA. I realized we were already trying to have a little more of Katz’s seasoned eye.

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In your approach to painting, you’ve talked about trying to emulate the immediate presence of jazz musicians.

The immediate present is my idea of eternity. It’s total consciousness. I don’t believe in regular eternity. It’s totally a state of consciousness. And that’s what I’m doing. And it makes the thing, what is realistic, be redefined. Every 20 years or so, people define what things look like. And the media has defined things for us. We see places with the media now, which wasn’t true 40 years ago.

This idea of the immediate present, is that the state that you are in when you’re painting?

More or less. More or less, I try to be in that state, yeah.

And is that a state you also would like someone to experience when they’re looking at your work?

Oh, to get this sense of something new. That’s pretty much what it is.

You’ve been painting over eight decades, since the 1950s. And yet your sense of time is linked to this idea of the immediate present. You’re best known for capturing what you call “quick things passing.” And you’ve talked about the 15-minute interval that’s so important for changing light.

Well, light changes. To get involved in painting a sunset, you have 15 minutes to make a sketch. And then what you do is make a sketch from what you remember of this moment. Then you go out and make another sketch, and then you paint a memory, what you think it looked like.

I love that. So there are so many different layers.

Yeah. You keep doing it to get what a real sunset is.

That’s such an amazing concept of time, of breaking down 15 minutes of real-time into an eternity.

What I’m trying to do is impossible.

But that’s a good thing to keep on trying to do.

I’m bound to fail, as they say.

Because of your idea of time, I’m interested in how you might define or think about seasons.

Every three months, everything looks different. I’m trying to get at that. I don’t want the painting to be like a static image of reality, like some Roman art or Renaissance paintings. They’re terrific paintings, but they’re very static in time. The sensation in my big paintings; a lot of them are painted with a big brush in one stroke, the whole thing. And that has a certain energy, that gesture. That coincides with the seeing. It sort of locks into it. If you’re doing a thinner line, it wouldn’t have the feeling of energy or the feeling I have when I see things. So, that part of it is crucial.

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