Visiting With Alex Katz The 99-Year-Old Artist Who Doesn’t Stop
Dodie Kazanjian
Being with Alex Katz in Lincolnville, Maine, is unlike anything else. Only 10 minutes from the scenic harbor of Camden, the landscape is rural without being rural—in the woods, but just a short drive to seaside life. The winding road, flanked by all those tall, standing-up-straight pines that are present in so many of Alex’s paintings, leads to the little beach where my late husband Tad and I and Alex (now 99) and his wife Ada ate lobster rolls, laughing and talking, just eight years ago. Things are different this time. Tad isn’t with us. Neither is Ada—she doesn’t come up from the city anymore. But her presence is everywhere.
I wanted to go to Maine again to see Alex and that bright-yellow house that he and Ada went to almost every summer since they married in 1958. When I arrive at 11 one August morning, he is sitting at a round wooden table that has been placed on the green grass outside, wearing an orange baseball cap, drinking coffee and having elevenses with his poet son Vincent and his wife Vivien (who runs the studio), their 27-year-old twin sons Isaac and Oliver and their girlfriends Anna and Kaylie, and Eno (after Brian Eno), Vincent and Vivien’s ever-present dachshund. It’s a family affair. It could also be an Alex Katz painting, if only his forever muse Ada was there.
I join the group, and it’s as if no time has passed since Alex and I last spoke. “The thing about being up here is, we don’t have to worry about the parties we’ve missed,” he says, laughing. “I sleep and work.”
He speaks pithily—not unlike his paintings, a bit Hemingway-esque—and he’s funny. Comes out with the unexpected. Gets a kick out of what he says. Laughs at it, as if it surprises him. “I tried a hearing aid,” he tells me. “Lost it on the way home. Tried it again, lost that one too. They’re bad for painting.”
“How are they bad?” I ask.
“You don’t have to hear to paint.”
His studio is a short walk across the property, looking onto Coleman Pond, though these days he is painting in the bright-blue barn studio attached to the house. Alex and primary colors are on good terms with each other. I think of that unforgettable portrait of Ada against a bright-red background that belongs to the Whitney Museum. There’s another big close-up of Ada’s face (this time in a black bathing cap) against a bright-red background here, hanging in the barn.
