John Ashbery and Alex Katz, Fragment, 1969. {Photograph} by Paul Takeuchi, courtesy of Alex Katz Studio and GRAY, Chicago/New York.
The painter Alex Katz is finest identified for his portraits—colourful, flat, wealthy, and life like, in a mode that has turn into instantly recognizable as his personal. Katz has all the time been fascinated by poetry, and particularly by the work that got here out of the New York College within the fifties and sixties. “What Katz discovered so compelling about this scene was its full disregard for aesthetic precedent, irreverence for an academy of poetry, and gravitation towards vernacular expression, the place phrases had been much less contemplated and possessed an immediacy that spoke of nowness,” writes the artwork historian Debra Bricker Balken within the forthcoming e book Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets. These qualities have one thing in widespread with Katz’s personal work, which could assist to clarify why he has been so drawn to collaborations with poets—amongst them illustrations, prints, and covers for books by Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Alice Notley, and Ron Padgett. Katz has additionally painted portraits of plenty of poets, together with his private favourite, Frank O’Hara, who was himself within the crossover between portray and poetry, and infrequently jealous of painters themselves. (“I’m not a painter, I’m a poet,” one O’Hara poem begins. “Why? I feel I’d moderately be / a painter, however I’m not.”) Under are a number of of Katz’s literary collaborations, together with a canopy he made for this very journal in 1985.
Alex Katz and Kenneth Koch, Interlocking Lives, 1970. {Photograph} courtesy of Alex Katz Studio and GRAY, Chicago/New York.
Alex Katz and Alice Notley, Phoebe Mild, 1973. {Photograph} courtesy of Alex Katz Studio and GRAY, Chicago/New York.
Oink! no. 18, 1984. {Photograph} by Adam Reich, courtesy of Alex Katz Studio and GRAY, Chicago/New York.
Difficulty no. 96 of The Paris Overview. {Photograph} courtesy of Alex Katz Studio and GRAY, Chicago/New York.
Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets is forthcoming from GRAY in September.
