57 YEARS OF ALEX KATZ

One Big Return of a Painter Who Never Left

It’s somewhat surprising that Alex Katz, whose instantly recognizable style has been exhibited widely for at least 50 years, has not had a New York retrospective since his 1986 Whitney Museum presentation. That will change with Alex Katz: Gathering opening at the Guggenheim Museum this fall. In anticipation of the show, Amanda Fortini captures the 95-year old artist’s essence in an insightful New York Times profile “Alex Katz is Still Perfecting His Craft,” where she highlights two of Katz’s early masterpieces, The Cocktail Party (1965) and The Lawn Party (1965).

When they were newly painted, and exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, these works were also reproduced in a 1965 Arts Magazine review by William “Bill” Berkson, who was part of Katz’s downtown artistic circle – and also pictured in The Cocktail Party, on the far right. From his perspective, Katz’s works offer timely revisions to Renaissance pictorial approaches:

They are pictures to be “read” in the Renaissance tradition, with rhymes, couplings, redoublings, value contrasts – but all used against that tradition’s bias, to tug the eye to the actual surface. For both paintings, the groups posed first all together, then, at various sittings, in twos and threes. Katz made small, rapid drawings of gestures that seemed interesting, and then settling on a distinctive pose for each model, he sketched them in small paintings on canvasboard. The final paintings show the effort but also the release of the kind of precision he was after.

“Bill” Berkson, a critic, poet, and teacher, was the consummate artworld insider of his day; in his 2016 obituary, the Times described him as “the ever-present third man from the left in the group photographs that chronicle the era.” Perhaps his proximity to his subject and community helped him foresee the lasting importance of these complex and innovative paintings.