Interesting surprises in Alex Katz show at Parrish Art Museum

While the cool and detached images in Alex Katz’s figural and landscape paintings seem to have become iconographic over time, the current exhibition of his work at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton offers some interesting surprises in its illuminative exploration into the process by which these well-known images were originally created by the artist.

Titled “Seeing, Drawing, Making” and featuring more than 50 works—including preliminary sketches, drawings, and paintings from Mr. Katz’s personal archive that have never before been shown—the exhibition offers entertaining insights beyond the artist’s well-known evocation of figures bursting with hip disengagement. Instead, the viewer is encouraged to focus on how the artist uses repetition as a means of refining and simplifying an image, leading to a distillation of form through a process that begins with initial spontaneity and leads, by stages, to a more studied finished product.

Exploring and elaborating from sketches to more finished drawings and large format “cartoons” on brown paper and concluding with completed paintings on canvas (although only a few of the latter are on view here), the artist and the exhibition offer a fascinating mix of the immediate and the planned. From this mix, the works express the illusory quality of artistic perception while melding that impression with the reality perceived by the artist, both at the moment of inception and at the eventual moment of completion.

In effect, they succinctly reflect the observation by the author and perceptual psychologist Rudolph Arnheim that “all perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, and all observation is also invention.”

This blending of process is immediately apparent in the series of graphite on paper sketches titled “Pamela” and the finished products themselves hanging nearby, which appear as lithographs from the “William Dunas Dance” cycle. In comparing them, the viewer can see the ways in which artistic intent impacts on the image as certain elements are either highlighted or obscured while the gestural impulse remains in the figure’s posture and the free flowing sweep of her configuration within the works’ compositional choreography.

It is, in fact, the structure of the figure itself which interests Mr. Katz, rather than the individual and emotional psychology of the model/dancer/subject. This is apparent in the artist’s decision to carefully render her eyes in one of the drawings, while de-accentuating their intensity and vibrancy in the final product. The change in emphasis underscores the sense of coolness for which Mr. Katz is known, but also allows the figure’s sense of elegant movement to become the dominant component, thereby allowing the work to become a portrait of dance rather than merely a portrait of a dancer.

This same distinction is also apparent in graphite works on paper and the oil on board work from the series “Last Look,” which was based on the choreographer Paul Taylor’s dance piece of the same name. Emphasizing form and gesture, the oil on panel in particular is strikingly dynamic with the emphatic movement sometimes echoed by mirrored reflections within the work, creating eddies of stop-action motion that lead rhythmically across the surface of the painting.

Highlighting the same sense of melody in motion as in the “Pamela” series, in these the activity is more intense and the rush of choreographed intensity is significantly more immediate.

By contrast, the drawings and sketches leading up to the “Study for Sunset” (oil on canvas, 1984) are also highly emotional, less because of any sense of motion 
of the two figures, but rather through 
the psychological and sensitive rapport that the artist emphasizes through 
their figural interactions.

This is also the case in considering “Eleuthera” (silkscreen on paper, 1989) featuring two women bathers and the various poses captured in sketches from which Mr. Katz derived the completed image. By contrast, in another larger painting, “Beach” (oil on linen, 2009), the figures within a blank landscape are interrelated by way of composition, yet seem miles apart in terms of emotional connections.

The exhibition of works by Alex Katz, titled “Seeing, Drawing, Making,” continues at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton through April 4.