At the Guggenheim, Alex Katz’s Paintings Are Intimate but Inscrutable

Alex Katz loves his wife. That much is obvious. He loves his kids, too, and his grandkids, and his coterie of famous friends. This cast of familiars appears constantly throughout the 95-year-old painter’s new retrospective, “Gathering,” on view at the Guggenheim Museum through February 20, 2023. There’s son Vincent, dancer Paul, and friends Yvonne, Rudy, and Edwin. And, of course, there’s Ada—Katz’s wife and eternal muse—who appears in nearly 20 pictures throughout the exhibition, from intimate tondo portraits to striking billboard visages. This sort of repeated depiction seems animated by love, or at least some strong sense of devotion.

Trying to parse what lies beneath the flat surface of a Katz portrait, and indeed beneath his artistic practice as a whole, can be difficult. There is a placid, even plain quality to the way he paints his sitters that tends to make them impenetrable. Images like Yvonne (1965) and Vincent and Tony (1969) seem to pass by like strangers on the street, or faces on magazine stands. They are handsome, stylish people, that much is clear, but they leave viewers with no further knowledge of who they are and how they move through the world. Katz’s early sketches of riders on the subway, included at the start of the Guggenheim’s rotunda, illustrate that this sort of fleeting voyeurism has always been an element of his practice. But as we get closer to the central subjects in Katz’s later pieces, that unknowability becomes more jarring than interesting.

The impenetrable tendency of Katz’s sitters is especially pronounced in his mature (and probably most iconic) work, which usually features a central subject amid a flat, monochrome background, like the 1963 Ada portrait The Red Smile. Katz came to this style in the late 1950s in a time of fertile confluence between Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, and the earliest rumblings of Pop Art. However, his dominant aesthetic referent seems to be the photographic image, specifically editorial and advertising photography. Look at The Red Smile: The light comes in from our vantage point, shining directly on Ada’s face, her blinding white smile front and center, the flat red field behind her calling to mind the backdrop of a photo studio. This is a legible, digestible image—the language of advertising.

This is, of course, Katz’s whole project. Flatness and flash are the main attractions. But in seeing his entire career laid out like this, that style and subject matter begin to wear thin. It seems like these types of images—pleasant, easily comprehensible, and advertising their sitters without granting any interiority—are everywhere now. That’s not Katz’s fault, but one can’t help but feel that he may have anticipated the logic of advertising too well, causing his pictures to sometimes feel like everything else.

To its credit, “Gathering” does a good job of tracking how Katz’s style has developed. His early subway sketches are followed by brief dalliances with imitations of Jackson Pollock and Paul Cézanne, and then by a series of cut-out collages that presage a lot of the flatness of his mature work. There’s a brushiness to his portraits from the late 1950s, like in Ada with Black Sweater (1957), that I found myself wishing would have stuck around longer. Irving and Lucy (1958), especially, is one of the most charmingly effective pieces in the retrospective, full of a fuzzy, knitted warmth that radiates out from the central couple. But by the mid-1960s, Katz’s style largely hardens into a slick surface. From there, his canvases grow dramatically in size while losing all sorts of depth.

It’s in this dynamic foreshortening that the engine of Katz’s practice comes into view. It is clear that he is an imagemaker, perhaps even more than he is a painter. In his varnished flatness, it’s the likeness of his subject that matters, not so much his handling of paint or particularities of light. It’s an old artistic tradition, present as much in Byzantine painting as in billboards. “Gathering” showcases Katz’s tendency to collect these likenesses and set them adrift, allowing them to multiply across frames and grow ever grander in scale.

There’s the impressive The Black Dress (1960), in which Ada is duplicated in various poses six times across a room, almost like a double exposure; or that work’s later spiritual descendant, Departure (Ada) (2016): a pared-back echo that finds six versions of Ada walking in a line through a green expanse. But the most obvious cases for Katz-as-icon-maker are the cut-outs that the curatorial team, led by Katherine Brinson, smartly scattered throughout the entire rotunda—letting the artist’s depictions of his friends, like artists Frank O’Hara and Francesco Clemente, escape the canvas and stand about in the real world. Maybe this is Katz’s idea of devotion: for his images to seamlessly map onto, even over, their physical antecedents.

This being a retrospective, we are treated to flashes of a different Katz through avenues variously embraced or abandoned. There’s a stretch of paintings created in the 1970s and early ’80s that embody a more naturalistic approach. Rudy and Yvonne (1977) and David and John (1977) work because Katz loosens his tight grip on light and setting, allowing his characters to live in real places, dappled by real sunlight. There’s also his persistent pursuit of landscape painting, an incongruous fit for a painter who works so much in flat planes and bright colors that fail to capture the expansiveness of nature.