Alex Katz at MoMA A Painter for all Seasons
By Brian P. Kelly
It’s always a pleasure when the familiar is tweaked just enough to provide a refreshing new perspective on what we thought we knew. That pleasure is doubled in a show at the Museum of Modern Art that revivifies a familiar artist and a familiar theme. The artist is Alex Katz, whose portraits, with simple yet vibrant planes of color, have made him instantly recognizable. The theme is the four seasons, a perennial subject tackled by everyone from Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Nicolas Poussin to Marc Chagall and Wendy Red Star.
In the airy second-floor atrium of the museum, his four monumental paintings surround visitors, and the ample space given to each allows viewers to immerse themselves in their atmosphere, feeling the warmth of the sun or the bite of frosty air. Organized by Ann Temkin with Elizabeth Wickham and Lydia Mullin, the display reveals the enduring powers of the artist.
Those who know Mr. Katz only from his portraits will be surprised at these minimal canvases. Tightly cropped images of trees, they strip nature down to its most basic components, like looking at DNA with an electron microscope. But this isn’t new territory for the painter, who spent much of his early career creating landscapes. The 97-year-old has returned to nature in the winter of his own life, and all the works here were made in the past two years. (They also serve as a thoughtful coda to the intriguing retrospective Mr. Katz had at the Guggenheim last year, which was arranged in a rough chronology and ended with a small selection of his recent landscape pieces.)
