|
lex Katz has become established as one of the most significant American painters of the 20th century. Since 1950 he has single-handedly altered what is known as American contemporary realism. Katz combines two ostensibly opposing forms of expression: hard-edged abstraction and representation. Often confused as a "Pop Artist", Alex Katz explains that "Pop-art was born exclusively by contemporaneity, my art leans on the painting tradition that is many centuries old".
Born on July 24, 1927 in New York City, Katz studied at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York from 1946-49 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine the following year. Katz spent the next ten years living very frugally, supporting himself by working part time in a framing shop, painting houses and doing paste-ups for magazine ads. During this time he spent six hours a day painting in order to form his style. Katz had his first successful show at the Tanager co-op gallery in 1959, when he was 32 years old. Since then Alex Katz has influenced generations of artists with his iconic figurative work.
Alex Katz's artwork can be found within the collections of the world's most prestigious museums. Alone in New York you can find his art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, which houses the largest collection of Katz's work outside of the Colby College Museum in Maine. Throughout the USA, museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts have work by Katz in their collections. Internationally the artwork of Alex Katz has been collected by museums such as the Tate Gallery in London, the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Hiroshima City Museum in Hiroshima and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Tokyo.
Katz was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972. He was awarded the Saint Gaudens Medal in 1980 and the Cooper Union Skowhegan Award in 1980. He received an honorary Ph.D. from Colby College in 1985. Alex Katz currently lives and works in New York City.
Art Interview: What was it like for you growing up in New York?
Alex Katz: I always did artwork as a little kid but I didn't think about being an artist. I did a lot of different things. By the time I was a teenager things began to conflict. I was running track and I was playing the violin in the orchestra at the same time. So I dropped the orchestra because I like track better. But if I had wanted to stay in track I should have remained at the school another half a year but I didn't. I got a job. It was just elimination. The thing that I felt most comfortable with was doing artwork.
Art Interview: What did your parents do for a living?
Alex Katz: My mother was an actress in Russia. She came here with the Jewish theater. My father was supposed to be a scholar but they had a tile factory in Russia and other places. All he did was play billiards and chase girls, I guess. They lost everything in the Russian revolution and came here. In seven years he had a middleclass house in a mixed neighborhood. We were the only foreign people there. So it was really a big culture shock.
Art Interview: Where you living in Brooklyn?
Alex Katz: Well no, he had a store in Queens. He basically bought coffee, blended it and sold it to restaurants. My mother's brothers were in the coffee business. He worked in a sweatshop and then went to work for them, then went into business for himself after about six years.
Art Interview: Did your parents encourage you to become an artist?
Alex Katz: My mother thought it would be an awful life but they thought the fine arts were something pretty good. We had a lot of oil paintings in the house and etchings.
Art Interview: Were your parents involved in the art scene?
Alex Katz: They knew a lot about art. My mother might have had a boyfriend who was a Russian artist. I don't really know: I never talked to her about that. But we had a lot of oil paintings in the house and etchings that were reproductions.
Art Interview: Were your parents able to assist you financially while you were attending art school?
Alex Katz: No, my father died in an automobile accident when I was sixteen and my mother got a job as a translator and ended up in Germany translating. I got part-time jobs and stayed in the house. It was a nice middleclass house in Queens. I went into the service and when I came back I got the G.I. Bill. [Government Issue Bill], which enabled me to study for three years for free.
Art Interview: Were you in the service during the war?
Alex Katz: No, I was in the service right after the war. I left for duty on VJ day. [August 15,1945 - Allied Victory in Japan during World War Two].
Art Interview: I understand that you originally studied commercial art?
Alex Katz: I went to a vocational high school and was supposed to study advertising but I ended spending two years drawing from antique drawings and casts because they didn't really care what you did. So my schooling as an artist was very good.
After I got out of the service I applied to Cooper Union, which was like a Bauhaus school. In 1946, people had to take a test to get in. I was so surprised when I received my acceptance letter that I jumped straight off the stoop. It was a provincial "Modern Art" school and I took commercial art courses and fine art courses there. During my last year I dropped all of the commercial courses because the fine art courses were more interesting.
I actually thought I would support myself doing commercial work and just paint on the side. That was my idea when I started at Cooper Union. I was selling spot drawings to the magazine Seventeen. Andy Warhol was also working for them at the time. But when they asked me to change my drawings I had trouble. I figured at that point it would take two or three years to become an established illustrator and it would take seven or eight to be a fine artist, so I decided to become a full time painter.
Art Interview: So the GI bill paid for your studies at Cooper Union. When you graduated from Cooper Union what type of degree did you have?
Alex Katz: They didn't give degrees; they gave a certificate. It was one the best art schools in the country. It was a big-time modern art school and there weren't very many of them at that time. I didn't know anything. I decided to study casts. [Drawing from cast sculpture reproductions of Renaissance masterpieces.] I vaguely knew who Cézanne was and I didn't know if Picasso was any good or not. We had modern art teachers who said: We don't do any atmospheric perspective here, we don't do any modeling, we just work in line and plane. As far as I was concerned all of the teachers knew more than I did and could paint better than I could so I listened to everything they said. I figured when I got out of school I would just throw it all out and figure it out myself and that's exactly what happened.
Art Interview: Did you have any role models at the school?
Alex Katz: No. The people in the year above me liked my work and liked me. But I didn't think of anybody as a role model. I always hung around people who were a little more intellectually advanced than I was. I kept doing that way up into my thirties.
Art Interview: At what point did you decide to become a professional artist? Was it during your last year at Cooper?
Alex Katz: No. In 1949 the top students in fine arts at Cooper Union received scholarships and access to the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney. Professor Ray Dowden asked me whether I wanted to go to Yale summer school or to The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. My friend Bill King had gone to Skowhegan the previous summer, so I decided to go to Skowhegan summer school.
While I was there I tried pleinair landscape painting because I had never done it before. So I began painting outdoors and it was a real kick, a real free-for-all. At that point I didn't really care whether I was a genius or not. I knew that I wasn't. But I just got so much enjoyment out of doing it that I just said: This is what I want to do with my life and maybe I'll do something good in about twenty years if I work hard.
Art Interview: Was the style of your landscape painting very different from what you eventually became famous for?
Alex Katz: Yes, of course. In art school there was modern art. In Cooper Union the work was like Cézanne's: it was a bit provincial and in a much earlier, older fashioned painting style. That act of painting was the thing. I was painting unconsciously and that was it. I figured I would make them modern later on. You know, make them look like they were new. So that's what I did over the next couple of years, I developed them into a modern style.
Art Interview: So you went from painting in a painterly style to a hard-edged style?
Alex Katz: No, no. I painted more painterly -less cubism, more open. I started the hard-edge paintings in the mid 50s. That was way before hardly anyone was doing it.
Art Interview: After finishing three years art school how did you approach a career as an artist?
Alex Katz: I got very good at Cooper and that gave me a perspective. After three years of listening intently to every word they said I didn't need any more teaching. Jean Cohen who I married got a cold water flat on East Sixth Street. I got a part-time job in a frame shop and I did extra work doing house painting and doing paste-ups. I lived very frugally. You could live cheaply in New York at that time. So I had five, six, seven years of living very poor. You know, living in a place without heat and things like that. But I was painting a lot. I was a full-time painter during those seven years of living very marginally. By the end of that time I could really paint.
Art Interview: How many paintings were you producing?
Alex Katz: Oh, I made about a thousand paintings during that period.
Art Interview: And you had your first solo exhibition at that time?
Alex Katz: Yes, I had five or six unsuccessful shows, one after the other.
Art Interview: How did you approach the galleries?
This oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Alex Katz on October 21, 2005. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany, and New York, New York, USA and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine.
|
