{"id":194675,"date":"2020-01-16T10:36:18","date_gmt":"2020-01-16T07:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ww-vb.mine.nu\/w108\/the-artist-who-has-painted-his-wife-more-than-200-times\/"},"modified":"2020-01-16T10:36:18","modified_gmt":"2020-01-16T07:36:18","slug":"the-artist-who-has-painted-his-wife-more-than-200-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/the-artist-who-has-painted-his-wife-more-than-200-times\/","title":{"rendered":"the artist who has painted his wife more than 200 times"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The \u201cartist\u2019s muse\u201d is unfashionable now, but she was the making of Alex Katz. As a young artist in 1950s New York, Katz didn\u2019t know how best to paint. He tried collages and landscapes, without much interest or success; he watched de Koonings and Lichtensteins flourish, but wasn\u2019t drawn to their novel styles. Then, in 1957, he met Ada Del Moro, and painted her, and it was as if he\u2019d realised how to see.<\/p>\n
Sixty years on, you wouldn\u2019t mistake a Katz for a painting by anyone else. He could trademark his style of portrait: coolly intimate close-ups, cleanly rendered in muted tones. More often than not, his subject is the same. He began with Ada in Black Sweater in 1957, shortly after they met; over 200 portraits later, here she is again in Ada with Pink Sweater 3, in her 92-year-old husband\u2019s show of new work at Timothy Taylor Gallery.<\/p>\n
Katz\u2019s longevity has given him hidden influence on the course of painting since the Second World War. He likes to say that he predates Pop art, and he\u2019s cordial at best about Hockney \u2013 two common points of comparison. He hung out in the 1960s with Johns and Rauschenberg (and believed he was better than them); without his discipline and treatment of colour, we mightn\u2019t have present-day stars such as Peter Halley or Jonas Wood.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And yet, in all those years, his public profile has never been high. It wasn\u2019t until October last year that Katz broke the \u00a31 million mark at auction, with the sale of Blue Umbrella I (1972). To shake a triumphant fist, Tim Taylor has hung a study for the painting in a corner of the present show. (It\u2019s a portrait of Ada, of course.)<\/p>\n
The occlusion of Katz, ironically, owes much to his technique. \u201cNo noodling\u201d is what he calls it, but the finish is so smooth that it hides the effort each picture involves. (Painting in the studio is all Katz ever does.) And, as this exhibition reminds you, his style isn\u2019t shocking or brash, but nor does it fit a straightforward box. He\u2019s sometimes called a \u201crealist\u201d, but the russet backdrop to Ada Evening 2 (painted in 2019, like all the paintings in this exhibition) is like nowhere on God\u2019s green earth; nor are the bright greens and yellows of Grass I \u2013 one of several landscapes here \u2013 what any eyes would see. On the other hand, his people are never \u201cabstract\u201d either; Ada has always been Ada, as recognisable now, in her early 90s, as then.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n