Alex Katz in New York: Surfaces become bodies

With his pop-inspired portraits, Alex Katz often went against the spirit of the times and nevertheless became one of the most popular painters in the world. In New York, the Guggenheim Museum is now showing his elegant life’s work

When Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman defined what was contemporary in the 1950s with their Abstract Expressionism, they did New Yorker Alex Katz something completely different: he painted portraits of people in the subway, other artists, poets and authors, he showed his circle of friends and his immediate environment.

In the large retrospective that winds its way up the snail-shaped Guggenheim Museum and encompasses Katz’s work from the 1950s to the present day, it is impressively clear how he found, refined and established his style, unfazed by everything that was happening around him. At 95, he still paints actively, even if the iconic portraits have given way to kitschy, abstract landscapes and flowers in recent years.

Katz goes from small to big over time. His paper collages are special, only about A4 in size, in which he creates reduced beach scenes from different colored paper surfaces. The assembling of bodies from surfaces also accounts for his special style in the oil paintings. Once he has chosen the main color for a face, he models depth through shaded areas, reflections of light and contours that are superimposed like stencils. While his models initially sit as whole figures in front of an empty background, Katz later zooms further and further into the faces.

“A picture reflects when it was created,” Katz once said, and since the 1960s his pictures have clearly been inspired by the colorful advertising and cinema aesthetics that also fascinated his Pop Art colleagues. In addition to celebrities from the New York cultural scene, one face keeps appearing – his wife Ada Katz, whom he has painted more than 1000 times to date and who can be seen in the exhibition in an impressive way as she ages.