The Jewish Museum Hosts 'Alex Katz Paints Ada'

Thursday, 19 October 2006 09:58

New York City -- The Jewish Museum will present Alex Katz Paints Ada, a wide-ranging survey exhibition, from October 27, 2006 through March 18, 2007.  Nearly 40 paintings created by the artist from 1957 to 2005, starring his wife, muse and favorite subject, will be on view.  Alex Katz’s impressive oeuvre includes landscapes, portraits and still lifes but he is best known for his ability to capture the essence of those close to him – his wife Ada, their son Vincent, and artists and friends in the couple’s inner circle.  These formal portraits, group scenes, and small paintings, which capture the extraordinary role Ada Katz has played in her husband’s creative life, have attained an iconic status and are unprecedented in their focus on a single subject over so many decades.

As critic Irving Sandler wrote, Ada is “woman, wife, mother, muse, model, sociable hostess, myth, icon, and New York goddess.”  In an essay for the book which is being published in conjunction with the exhibition, art historian Robert Storr writes of the “series of paintings Alex Katz has devoted to the muse who is for him closest to home – his wife, Ada.  Still in progress, the series stretches over a period of nearly fifty years – from the waning heyday of New York School gestural abstraction through the advent and attenuation of Pop, Minimalism, and Neo-Expressionism, as well as a host of other tendencies not excluding those which sought to eclipse traditional means altogether starting with figurative painting.  In short, during that half century everything about art and much about American society has changed.  Remarkably very little about Ada has.  That is the mark of her musedom.”

For exhibition curator Ruth Beesch, The Jewish Museum’s Deputy Director for Program, Katz’s paintings are “a sort of window to the worldly and fashionable… there is a sense of glamour about Katz’s subjects, particularly Ada.”  Storr observes that “Katz’s reality is a ‘Paradise Found’ of cultivated taste, aesthetic accomplishment, social ease, and marital contentment suspended above a world of clashing ideas, high-cost failures, general unrest, and sexual strife.”

The exhibition is organized into a series of thematic sections beginning with an introduction followed by: “Only Ada,” “Ada, Ada, Ada,” “Friends and Family,” “Existential Ada,” and “Style and Glamour.”  They focus on the artist’s stylistic developments and concerns but also on the contexts that Ada is pictured in.  In “Only Ada,” the standing portraits are remarkably astute in their use of the subject as vehicle for formal explorations of flatness, light, and color reminiscent of Matisse.  The “Ada, Ada, Ada” section presents works containing multiple representations of Ada.  In “Friends and Family,” paintings of Katz’s favorite subjects, those close to him, including Ada, his son Vincent, and the circle of artists, poets, and dancers who make up his social milieu, are on view.  Katz has described himself as a cool painter; he likes detachment and deliberately cultivates an impersonal look about his paintings and their subjects.

Alex Katz met Ada Del Moro in 1957 and they married in 1958.  Ada in Black Sweater marks the beginning of their collaboration as artist and model.  Ada has been called Katz’s muse.  Ruth Beesch notes “His paintings of her are emblematic of far more: they chart the changes in American art and culture of the last fifty years, challenge current theories of feminism and representation, and remind us that this is an artist who understands art history from the Renaissance to Matisse and Rothko.  These works are often captivating because of what they leave out and do not say, and for the way they explore formal aspects of painting while hinting at thinly veiled narratives.  It is also clear that Ada directly influences how much Katz reveals about her.”

Alex Katz was born in 1927 in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and after graduating from high school and serving in the Navy, studied from 1946 to 1949 at The Cooper Union in New York.  In 1994, the school endowed the Alex Katz Visiting Chair in Painting, and in 2000 honored the artist with its Artist of the City award.  From 1949 to 1950, Katz continued his studies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

Alex Katz’s early career spans postwar American art from Abstract Expressionism through the rise of Minimalism and Conceptual art, movements that were at odds with figurative painting.  For more than four decades he has consistently worked in a representational manner, closely observing what he sees in his “own backyard” and creating an expressly American form of realism.  It is reductive and economical and conveys only as much as Katz needs it to, reconciling the intangible realm of abstract art and the everyday stuff of living.

He had his first solo exhibition in 1954 at the Roko Gallery in New York, and since then his work has received nearly 200 solo exhibition around the globe, including a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986.  His works are collected in numerous public collections worldwide.  Today, Katz is viewed as a mentor for a new generation of artists in a variety of mediums.

A lavishly illustrated 128-page book, Alex Katz Paints Ada by Robert Storr with additional essays by Lawrence Alloway and James Schuyler, containing 66 color plates and 6 black-and-white illustrations, accompanies the exhibition and is being co-published by The Jewish Museum, New York and Yale University Press.  The hardcover book sells at The Jewish Museum’s Cooper Shop and at bookstores worldwide.

About The Jewish Museum
The Jewish Museum was established on January 20, 1904 when Judge Mayer Sulzberger donated 26 ceremonial art objects to The Jewish Theological Seminary of America as the core of a museum collection.  Today, The Jewish Museum maintains an important collection of 25,000 objects – paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, archaeological artifacts, ceremonial objects, and broadcast media. Widely admired for its exhibitions and educational programs that inspire people of all backgrounds, The Jewish Museum is the preeminent United States institution exploring the intersection of 4,000 years of art and Jewish culture.  Visit : www.thejewishmuseum.org