Still, over time misconceptions calcified. Brown tells me that Katz was once “iconic to anybody who was interested in art,” but “got somewhat pigeonholed, or had some preconceptions locked around him that don’t really apply.” One reason for this may be that Katz’s work is difficult to categorize — “singular” is the word critics and curators often use to describe it — hovering, as it does, between realism and abstraction. He has never aligned himself with any art school or tradition, and his concerns are essentially technical and formalist (how to render an instance of perception in paint) rather than narrative or expressionist. “If I had to make a career out of ideas, I don’t think that I could do anything very well,” he said in 1989 in a published dialogue with the artist Francesco Clemente. “To me, ideas are subject matter and not that important … style is important. Style and appearance.” Yet an interest in something as ephemeral and evanescent as style is not today seen as the concern of a serious artist.
His paintings neglect to propound a narrative, a concept or a political message, embodying an approach that’s also not very popular right now, when artwork is often reduced to a “message-delivery system,” as the poet and essayist Alice Gribbin has written, rather than viewed as the site of a mysterious aesthetic encounter between artist and audience. To proponents of this utilitarian view, his work can seem a tad old-fashioned, to use a term from Katz’s lexicon. But for the painters who have come after him, who have themselves tried to break free of the persistent tethers of narrative, psychology or politics — and Katz’s influence can be seen in the work of many contemporary painters, from Elizabeth Peyton’s portraits of idealized celebrities to the elevated pop culture symbolism of Sam McKinniss — his total devotion to his craft has been a revelation. “He’s exemplary in all kinds of ways,” says David Salle, who has known Katz for more than 40 years. “One is just simply staying the course. That in itself is inspiring — I don’t think that’s too corny a word. … He’s certainly an example of someone who defined his sensibility and was true to himself early on and never wavered from it, only got deeper into it.”
The public also tends to judge art that seems effortless as less complicated or worthy. “The paintings look easy, the way Fred Astaire made dancing look easy and Cole Porter made words and music sound easy, but don’t let’s be fooled,” the critic John Russell wrote in 1986 on the occasion of Katz’s last retrospective, adding, “When it comes to the art that conceals art, Katz is right in there with those two great exemplars.” Katz says that he completes one of his large-format canvases quickly, usually in a morning, painting with a wet on wet technique (also known as alla prima), in which wet paint, generally oil, is applied before previous layers of paint are dry. But such feats of controlled improvisation require a fair amount of preparation. He paints sketches in oil and draws studies in pencil, usually observed from life (though sometimes, these days, he takes photographs with his iPhone), and then, for the large paintings, employs a version of the Renaissance cartoon technique, which involves enlarging the image on paper and transferring an outline of it to canvas via pouncing — making tiny perforations and pushing powdered pigment through them.
On the third and last day that I visit his studio, he has just finished a 7-by-10-foot painting of the ocean at Coney Island — it is vast and absorbing, glossy black with white droplets of paint, and it reminds me of looking out a car window in the rain. He tells me it took him two hours to complete. Jazz plays in the background, and it occurs to me that he’s not unlike the jazz musicians he admired in his youth (“I wanted to paint like Stan Getz,” he tells me), rehearsing and preparing to extemporize in the moment. We stand back to observe the gleaming canvas. “It’s about motion, weight and transparency,” he says. He goes to his workbench and begins rooting around, pulling out several photographs he took on the beach in Coney Island on a cold February day. They are images of the surf coming in, bubbled and white like spit, to which he has taken a black marker and drawn a small rectangle on the specific sliver he rendered in the giant painting before us. The photo looks unremarkable to me, but his eye discerned a patch of surf, a snapshot, a passing wrinkle of time, that stood out to him.
Brown tells me that he thinks all of Katz’s paintings are about “light in time,” as he puts it: “The material of time is light, and so he’s painting light, whether it be on a flower, a landscape or a human face.” Katz has often said that he aspires to paint “in the present tense,” meaning not only that he paints with some speed, attempting to capture a transient moment, but also that the immediacy of his approach will translate to a similar feeling in the painting. “These are very fleeting, fast things,” he has said of his landscapes. “It’s a 15-minute interval you’re looking at.”
Time is an implicit theme of the Guggenheim show. As I sit with Katherine Brinson in a conference room, flipping through the plates of the works to be hung on the spiral walls of the museum’s rotunda, she points out how the exhibition underscores the “unfolding of the arc of time” even more so than with a typical retrospective: “Of course, you’ll see that in the way he develops stylistically, over the arc of the career, but you also literally see the sitters age.” There is Ada, a young brunette woman in a cobalt blue dress; and there she is 60 years later in the warm glow of evening, her face gently lined, her dark hair streaked gray.
