Realist painter Alex Katz turns 80 this year, bursting with the energy and competitive drive of a typical New Yorker, writes Aidan Dunne
He's painted lots of landscapes but Alex Katz is, more than anything, a poet of the city, and not just any city, either. He is indelibly associated with New York, and has shaped the way we see it with his paintings of people and places there, by day and by night. Alex Katz: New York gathers together a substantial cross-section of his work from the end of the 1950s to the end of the 1990s. The earliest piece in the show is actually a cut-out portrait of another city poet, perhaps the city poet, Frank O'Hara, a close friend of Katz's in the 1950s and early 1960s.
O'Hara died in a freak accident in 1966, and Katz has said on more than one occasion that, with his death, the party ended. In Dublin with his wife (and frequent model) Ada, he says it again now: "It's true. It was as though the party began after the war and it just went on. But after Frank died, it was as if things had changed. Nothing was the same."
Katz, tall, athletic and stylishly clad in black, is remarkably youthful for someone who turns 80 this year, but perhaps none of that is surprising for an artist who was for a long time as likely to turn up on the pages of Vogue as Flash Art.
THE PARED-DOWN, stylised realism of his paintings is unmistakable, and has influenced an entire generation of younger figurative artists. He distills the messy complexity of the world into elegantly spare arrangements of colour planes. It looks simple and in a sense it is - until you try to do it, or analyse it. A significant part of Katz's achievement is down to his exceptional flair as a colourist, though it's so understated that most of the time you'd hardly notice. "Realist painting," he observes, "has to do with leaving out a lot of detail. I think my painting can be a little shocking in all that it leaves out. But what happens is that the mind fills in what's missing. It's about being able to see something in a specific way. Painting is a way of making you see what I saw."
Even though he leaves out a great deal, though, he is not averse to building up quite complicated compositions, as in several double portraits and his series of cocktail party paintings from the 1970s. "I think my painting tends to go one of two ways, either extremely complicated or extremely simple. They even said that to me in art school. Every so often I'll get the urge to make a painting that has everything in it but the kitchen sink."
Katz's father arrived in the US from Russia in 1921. Alex and his brother were brought up in Queens, as assimilated Americans. No languages other than English were allowed. Tragically, his father was killed in an accident when he was about 16. His mother was left to hold the fort, with some difficulty. He joined the navy just as the second World War ended. "I was in the navy for a year and I had a great time, I had a ball." More importantly, the GI bill meant that he could afford to go on to third-level education. "In the event I chose Cooper Union, which was free. My mother said I should have gone to Paris. But Cooper was one of three or four modern art schools in the US worth going to. It was very competitive." He also worked in the fairly bohemian environment of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, which first brought him to Maine, where he and Ada still spend three months of every year.
Competitive himself by nature, he worked hard and tended to be critical of the prevailing orthodoxy, whatever it happened to be, reacting against the figuration of art school and then against the dominance of Abstract Expressionism in New York. In fact, he managed to avoid becoming an Abstract Expressionist and then, perhaps even more adroitly, he avoided becoming a Pop artist in the 1960s - "My paintings would be poor as Pop Art," he notes wryly. In his memoir, Irving Sandler, at the time a gallery manager and a long-term friend, recalls that Katz was one of a group of artists who felt the need to inaugurate a new realism, "to replace the hot, dirty, direct-from-the-self look with a cool, clean, distanced-from-the-self look." Retrospectively, Sandler has a clear-headed view of Katz's position during the 1960s, seeing him as eschewing both Pop Art and photo-realism. The former's obsession with commercial products and imagery, the latter's with the camera, were anathema to him.
Equally, post-modern irony is not at all what he's about. He wants to be an optical painter of everyday reality. For him the point is to be, as Baudelaire had famously put it, a painter of modern life. How do you paint your world in a way that is in sympathy with that world? Once he'd painted out of doors, he said, he knew which way he had to go. He was and is in many respects a thoroughly traditional painter: he paints what he sees directly around him, with oil on canvas, and he paints wet-in-wet (a technique in which the paint is not allowed to dry before the painting is finished), but there is a contemporary look to what he does.
Inevitably, while he has many admirers, there are some detractors. Robert Hughes, for example, rather grudgingly acknowledges his abilities, but goes on to dub him the "Norman Rockwell of the intelligentsia." Hughes' problem seems to be the lack of evident struggle in Katz's paintings. He wants to see the wounds, the signs of battle with an intractable subject. But this is a way of saying that Katz is not what Hughes wants him to be, he's something else, something that Hughes cannot readily relate to. One common charge is that his work is, as Sandler puts it (though the view is not his own), "unfeeling and inexpressive".
IN FACT, IT hardly needs pointing out that there are reservoirs of emotion in Katz's painting, but that emotion is never articulated in terms of a demonstrably expressive idiom: feeling is not fore-grounded. Instead he aspires to objective description. The surfaces of Pollock's or Cezanne's paintings are choppy and open, but Katz's surfaces are closed and impassive. He readily admits that a quote famously attributed to him is accurate: "I prefer Stan Getz to Sartre." Existentialist introspection is strongly associated with the expressionists. By contrast: "I got much more from hearing Stan Getz.
"What I admired about him was his technical proficiency, his coolness and his lyricism - I like to think that there is lyricism in my painting. Getz would play these extraordinary passages, and yet the nearest he'd get to a display of emotion was to blink."
HE IS AVERSE to things that are overly demonstrative in general. Man with Brown Hat is, he says, by way of being a homage to the actor Alan Ladd. "I liked the way he was totally flat as an actor. He had two expressions, smiling and not smiling. There's a story that he handed back a script once and said: 'I can't do this. It calls for acting.'" Katz doesn't belabour it, but he went through a fairly tough time in the 1960s and 1970s, attacked by the various art world factions from which he stood apart. "Well, it's true," he acknowledges, "my paintings were considered as being peculiar paintings. I couldn't give them away."
But, he points out, it's also true that he always had an informed and discerning audience. "Frank O'Hara bought two, and he never bought anything. Fairfield Porter bought them . . ." And so on. "The good thing is that I lived long enough. If I'd died 20 years ago it would have been another story," he laughs. At an opening of an exhibition of his work in Germany, a woman approached him and put her hand on his arm. "Aren't you glad," she said, "that you didn't have to wait 400 years to be appreciated, like Hieronymus Bosch."
The exhibition incorporates a series of beautiful aquatint portraits of poets together with verses. At some point in the 1960s he switched allegiance from jazz to poetry. "Sonny Rollins was about the last guy I really liked. In the 1960s, jazz became too intellectual." Whereas poetry had a kind of vibrant, inventive energy that appealed to him. It's a passion that has stayed with him (and his son, Vincent, is a poet and translator). "The American novel now, I have problems with it." He grimaces. Poetry, though, is edgy and, besides: "I like the speed. It's fast, and you can read it over and over again." He has gravitated towards the French symbolists, to the extent that: "I forced myself to learn to read in French." Ada nods: "It's true. I'm impressed." Energy doesn't seem to be a problem for him. It never was, he agrees, and says that he is working more than ever.
Painting wet-in-wet as he does, much of the time on a huge scale, is demanding and is a high-risk strategy. If it's wrong, it's wrong. "It's intense. You can't choke. You've got to pay attention to the paint, you've got to be really conscious of what you're doing." There were, he notes, thousands of discarded paintings during the 1950s. "It took me about six years to get the technique." He's fairly sure of it now. "I'm pretty much in control. Now when I start a painting, I know it will be good, but it's a question of just how good you can make it."
Alex Katz: New York is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham, Dublin, until May 20. Admission is free. 01-6129900
Alex Katz: Small Paintings continues at Hillsboro Fine Art, 49 Parnell Square, Dublin, until March 9