Power Portraits
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Alex Katz believes that “style is my content.” The veteran realist, who turned 77 this summer, has a new show opening today at PaceWildenstein in Chelsea: 12 paintings, 10 of which are portraits of “power women” in the season’s newest outfits.
The series was commissioned by the fashion magazine W, which will showcase them in its October issue. This is no sell-out of high art to commerce nor an ironic or camp statement. Mr. Katz’s artistic ambitions have never been shy of elegance or pizzazz. His art is pervaded by a sense that life is a breeze – for maker, viewer, and subject alike.
During the last decade, this attitude has made him the super cool mentor of a new generation of artists in a variety of mediums. For most of his career, though, “styling” was a taboo for the serious, “advanced” artist, and made him suspicious in the eye’s of critical stuff shirts.
In the late 1940s, when Mr. Katz began painting, an existentialist ethic of personal authenticity prevailed. The artist – wresting form from his unconscious – was indifferent to beauty and aggressively hostile towards received taste. Formalists made heavy dogma out of historically inevitable shifts in style determined by almost philosophical engagement with their medium. Conceptual art, like the earlier, politically motivated social realism, brought back the subject with a vengeance.
Mr. Katz’s aesthetic of elegance and finesse flew against all these orthodoxies: “I don’t like heaviness of any kind, whether formal or conceptual,” he told me. “It was confining, and I wanted to be free.”
Mr. Katz was the obvious choice for W to turn to for fearlessly (shamelessly) suave, energetic images of beauty and fashion. His style is a knowing collision – one developed before Pop – of high and low art forms and plays with the fashion plate as surely as it plays the billboard off art-historical precedents.
His self-portraits read like a visual history of American conceptions of the cool, from the porkpie hat and zoot suit in “Passing,” (1962-63) to the forcibly vacant aloofness of “Self-Portrait with Sunglasses” (1960), or “Green Jacket,” (1989), where art historian Irving Sandler detected a pose somewhere between a renaissance nobleman and a basketball star. Mr. Katz has had a long love affair with female “haute couture,” whether painting swimsuits, wedding dresses, or power suits.
His stylish sitters are always supremely comfortable in their clothes, which form a second skin. But the tailor-made fit of Mr. Katz and couture goes beyond a mere interest in clothes as subject matter, rich as they are for a realist attuned to social and character detail alike. For this artist, sartorial presentation is as much a metaphor for painting as a motif. Like his own technique, his sitters’ wardrobe is at once classy and casual, composed and nonchalant. Coolest of all, his assertive style never seems precious or affected.
I caught up with him in Maine last week, where he and his wife, Ada, have summered every year since the mid-1950s. He has just curated for Colby College – where a wing is devoted to Mr. Katz’s work – a show of “Contemporary Painting” showcasing eight young painters.
“They asked me to curate a show. First they suggested people I thought were influenced by me, but I didn’t think that was a good idea. Then they said ’emerging artists,’ but that’s impossible when you think about it. Then I thought about a bunch of people who are lively right now. The criterion was that they should be interesting enough that you want to see another show.”
This might sound a rather low threshold of excellence, but it doesn’t take long, in talking to Mr. Katz, to realize that his standards are merciless.
“They used to say the painting world consisted of 100 people, with people coming in and out. It is basically the same, except that it has gone global.”
How has the competition from abroad affected the New York art world?
“There are certainly fewer interesting artists in the United States. In the 1950s they were more interesting in New York than elsewhere, but I don’t think that’s the case now.”
The line-up for the Colby show is a mix of the established superstar and the unknown. It is also strikingly international, although the majority are now based in New York: Richard Bosman was born in India and grew up in Australia; Cecily Brown, Scottish-born and Canada-raised Peter Doigand, and Welsh-born Merlin James all have London connections. Maureen Cavanaugh, Laura Owen, Elizabeth Peyton, and Bill Saylor are American.
Mr. Katz speaks about his selection as if they are elements in a collage: “They fit together. The spaces between painters are as interesting as the painters themselves.” Many other names were considered, but invariably there was someone in the final cut working in an overlapping area “who was more proficient.”
Mr. James and Ms. Peyton are two of the most distinct forces in the current renewal of painting, and I see a connection between the two of wistfulness, a sense of melancholy about painting. But Mr. Katz would have none of that. “I don’t really try to think of painting in those terms – optimistic or pessimistic,” he says, though he concedes that Mr. James, with his ethereal, near monochrome still lives, has “a down style.”
“What people noticed is that the work is brushy, physical,” he offers as a unifying factor in his choice in contrast to any ideas of mood. He wonders how I can see Ms. Brown’s splodgy, erotic compositions as “wistful.” But isn’t there an ironic distance from her own expressive handling, an attitude that recalls the diffident Gerhard Richter? “She paints better than Gerhard Richter. He has better imagery, but her application is much more refined – the changing tones and colors are very subtle.”
None of the artists in the show make swork that looks like his own. Tellingly, all the young painters use photographs as their source material, which Mr. Katz never does, as he is invested in working from observation. “It is true, I work from life, but most of the other people who do aren’t as interesting as these people. The thing is to make an interesting painting. How you make it doesn’t matter much.”
He describes Ms. Cavanaugh’s work – fey, naive, washy paintings with pencil-drawn details depicting skinny young women holding deer – as “Girlie hip, a kind of expressionistic Japanese painting.” The term “girlie” might seem politically incorrect, but it emerges that Mr. Katz, as ever, has his ear to the ground: He heard it from a young woman visitor to his studio, who was impressed by his cheery palette, smooth touch, and infatuation with finish.
The masculine is often played off against the feminine in Mr. Katz’s style, which has in equal strength elements of machismo and the effete. To create his signature style, Mr. Katz melded together street-savvy fashion consciousness and the rhythms of jazz, dance, and modern poetry. There is an element of sport in the speed with which he paints “wet in wet,” on a challenging scale, but his style and attitude set him apart from the butch aspect of the New York School – as does his love of couture.
“I wanted to paint fashion,” he says of the latest show. “W sent me photos of models to choose from. Then they thought they’d send fashion editors, who are often as beautiful as models anyway. Then they wanted to do power women. They sent the latest clothes from the designers for me to chose from.”
But Mr. Katz is no faithful reproducer of fashion. His eccentric compositions are so radically cropped, flattened, and stylized that you’d have to be the keenest connoisseur to guess the labels. What he does capture, however, is the aura of high style.
In one of his favorite encounters with his “power women,” the actress Tilda Swinton stayed in what she was wearing that day, which was way more stylish than the 20 frocks that had been sent along. Mr. Katz was riveted by her blond eyelashes. “She understood that she looked bizarre. She is a real intellectual who understands painting.”
A bigger surprise was the pop singer Alicia Keys. W wanted to include women with larger personal following than the artists he painted – who included Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Mariko Mori – so they sent him Martha Stewart and Ms. Keys.
“She realized I didn’t know anything about popular culture, that I was out of it, but she was very polite about it. After the sitting, she was leaving to go to Shea Stadium. She was about to tour Germany, where she had 40 shows in 40 nights: It’s a level you can’t believe, but she is an unassuming, pleasant person.”
He narrowed the clothes sent by “W” down to five pieces and had the singer’s mother make the final choice.
“She gave me a smile, and I said,’terrific.’ A split-second thing, but she could return to it. She knew what she looked like. She was like a theater person. She could talk and hold a pose. She is the only one where I went straight to a painting, and didn’t have to do a second, corrective drawing. She didn’t have the time and I didn’t need it. It was the most accurate of the whole bunch, thanks to her.”
Dutifully, I asked if Martha Stewart showed the strain of her recent travails. “I didn’t think about it. I just tried to paint what I was looking at. She didn’t look happy but she did look kind of strong.”
I imagined, I said, that expressive faces are easier to paint than beautiful ones, and Mr. Katz agreed. “There is regular and irregular beauty. With regular beauty, if you miss just a bit it can be a disaster. Someone can have a large nose. If you make it too large, she’s no longer beautiful, but if you make it smaller she becomes ordinary. You have to be very precise.”
Mr. Katz can “style” with the precision of the fanciest designer, but thanks to the quality of what he achieves, the results need never go out of fashion.