From left to right, Charline von Heyl, “A Child Telling a Joke,” 1960; Thaddeus G. Mosley, “Enclosure,” 2006; Anselm Kiefer, “Untitled ,” 1996. (Photo by Isabel Shepherd)
“Alex Katz’s playlist” is how Shalini Le Gall, chief curator at the Portland Museum of Art, refers to the current headliner show: “Painting Energy: The Alex Katz Foundation Collection at the Portland Museum of Art” (through Sept. 14). And what a playlist it is: modulated in its tone and voice, illuminating in the way it sheds light on its author’s own tastes and predilections, and varied in its array (one could say from Top 40 to alternative music and everything in between). It is the caliber of show that the PMA, as our (albeit miniature) version of The Metropolitan in New York, deserves.
Explaining his own work, Katz has said: “The abstract expressionists had that thing of, subject matter becomes content, content becomes form. And I always thought there was no room for style. I felt with my painting the style really is the content. The style holds everything together.”
This is a telling statement. Style is everything in a Katz painting, from the manner of painting to the poses to the clothes his subjects wear. So much so that his work is instantly recognizable in a very New York sort of vein. So, it is a revelation to see how much broader his collecting habits stray, going beyond style to include his surprisingly democratic and astonishingly knowledgeable appreciation of the entirety of modern art (and beyond).
Certainly, there are works that share synchronies with the stylistic parameters Katz imposes on his own work: an emphasis on figuration, broad expanses of color, the stripping of form to its essentials, asymmetrical composition, a love affair with the flatness of the picture plane.
From left to right: Kamrooz Aram, “Untitled (Arabesque Composition),” 2020, oil, crayon, and wax paper on canvas; Sojourner Truth Parsons, “Blue by you II,” 2022, acrylic on linen; Chris Martin, “Jupiter Landscape,” 2021, acrylic on canvas). (Photo by Isabel Shepherd)
But there are also works that spill over these boundaries, as if in his collecting habits Katz indulges impulses that he represses to achieve the discipline and rigor he strives for in his own painting. The running thread throughout the show is embodied in the title. Katz believes painting has energy that lures the viewer toward it, and that comes across unequivocably in the collection’s selections. There are only about a third of the approximately 150 artworks Katz has donated to the PMA on display, gifts that have irrevocably changed the character and breadth of the museum’s modern and contemporary holdings. Katz has been nothing if not prodigiously generous to the PMA (and other institutions).
Naturally, energy takes on many manifestations. Gesture, emotive expression, physicality and other more obviously detected forms of energy are here. But there is also a lot of energy that is quiet and subtle.
For instance, three landscapes aligned on one wall in the first gallery by, from left to right, Charles Burchfield, Fairfield Porter and Edward Hopper. Each exudes its own susurrus insistent vitality. Burchfield’s “A Fallen Tree” is the most alive, partly because of the saturation of color achieved from gouache on paper, but also from Burchfield’s uncanny way of distilling an image to basics. We comprehend his powers of observation, but it is more abstracted and essential in a manner not unlike Katz’s work, which conveys something more of its realness. The painting looks close to disintegrating completely into splotches of camouflage colors.
“Realist painting has to do with leaving out a lot of detail,” Katz has also said. “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…Painting is a way of making you see what I saw.” Indeed, we gladly fill in the cool ambient moisture of the woods, the sound of rustling branches in a wind, and the insects feeding on the rotting trunk.
Tom Burckhardt, “Eureka,” 2012, oil on cast plastic. (Photo by Isabel Shepherd)
Porter’s “Morning Sun Over the South Meadow” feels washed out by the sun in comparison, but its intimation of heat and bright light is no less visceral. Hopper’s “Four Dead Trees,” rendered in pencil and watercolor, is meticulously detailed by comparison, though not photorealistic either. Yet we feel, as with Porter, the sun’s warmth and the rustle of grass, the strafing of clouds across the sky. In all three, we can also discern the artist’s own experience of these landscapes — meditative, respectful and subsumed in their beauty.
We also understand how Katz might be drawn to these images (particularly Burchfield). Less expected is the kind of minute detail we encounter in the magnificent portrait of the poet Barry Yourgrau, “Barry,” by Janet Fish, which would seem to contradict his statement above about leaving out detail.
You are unlikely to see a more precisely executed clear plastic bag. But this painting also feels loaded with symbolism in the manner of Netherlandish vanitas artists, where each object is meant to convey a particular lesson or moral. At the same time, its scale and the quotidian nature of the objects—a newspaper, a typewriter, a half-eaten sandwich—harkens to the way Gustave Courbet glorified the commonplace, though sans that artist’s political agenda.
Affinities with Katz’s own style are far more obvious when we consider Marsden Hartley’s blocky figures in “On the Beach” (“the blunt minimalism of figural forms,” as Marlene Dumas refers to Katz’s human subjects in one of the catalog’s many excellent essays), vast expanses of pink sand and blue sky, as well as flatness. We also feel these stylistic parallels in Stuart Davis’s “After-Study” (the saturated primary colors, more flatness).
But the collection is rich with complexities and thematic tangents that go beyond the binary of synchronicity-polarity with Katz’s own pictorial concerns. Sigmar Polke’s “Ik Mach Dass Schon Je$s (I’ll take care of it, Je$s)” and Anselm Kiefer’s “Untitled,” both massive works that hang opposite each other, represent two responses to the meaning — if any — behind painting in the Post War era. Polke moves on from historical styles as antiquated and irrelevant, while Kiefer uses history to comment on itself.
Polke adopts images and techniques from mass media, employing them as commentary on the way they were used first in Nazi Germany and later in the Cold War. Kiefer repeatedly confronts the horror wrought by his countrymen by developing a visual poetic language steeped in German tradition that, in the words of Joachim Homann’s catalog essay, makes “The connection between one’s own life and cosmic totality.” The fallibility and potential cruelty of human nature against the larger forces of the universe that provide us with moral context are frequently co-emergent.
Tommy Malekoff, “Desire Lines,” 1992, two-channel digital video and sound. (Photo by Isabel Shepherd)
Less confrontational, yet hypnotically fascinating, is Tommy Malekoff’s “Desire Lines,” a two-channel video that examines an urban artifact we normally consider inert and, at its worst, evidence of sprawling overdevelopment: the parking lot. The work reveals these open spaces instead as sites that generate culture, creativity, familial relations and initiating ritual. Malekoff films these lots during the times they come alive, showing them as epicenters of human activity and socialization. They function as stages for marching band practice, break-dancing one-upmanship, tailgate parties, games, macho rights of passage such as tracing acrobatic wheelies and skid marks on its surface, and so on.
The show is exuberantly and intriguingly hung, creating probing conversations amongst works, as in a trio of abstract paintings by Kamrooz Aram, Sojourner Truth Parsons and Chris Martin. There is a rich dialogue amongst them about human architecture and ornament (with its sense of enclosure and applied decoration in Aram’s “Untitled, Arabesque Composition”) and architecture of the mind (“Parsons’s Blue By You II”) in relation to the infinite architecture of the universe (Martin’s “Jupiter Landscape”).
Clockwise from top left: Federico de Francesco, “Da Capo Aria 1,” 2021; Yvonne Jacquette, “Galaxy of Night Lights,” 2022; Marlene Dumas, “Alex,” 2023; Chantal Joffe, “Topless Self-Portrait in Reading Glasses (small version),” 2014; Anne Neely, “Fodder,” 2017; Katherine Bradford, “Shadows,” 2012; Marcus Leslie Singleton, “The Writer,” 2022. (Photo by Isabel Shepherd)
Only one section feels, to me, random: a grouping of paintings by Federico de Francesco, Yvonne Jacquette, Marlene Dumas, Chantal Joffe, Anne Neely, Katherine Bradford and Marcus Bradley Singleton. I can appreciate that the attempt is to show the democracy of Katz’s artistic worldview. It mixes figuration, abstraction, portraiture, multiple cultural perspectives and moods. But it seems to convey more dissonance than diversity. I question the need for it in the first place, since we already have so much variety in style, genre and media on display. That’s a strong enough embodiment of Katz’s generous vision, which makes this sort of mini-hanging within a hanging seem superfluous. This is no reflection whatsoever on the individual works, which are all interesting for their own reasons.
There is so much here that you’ll need to come back again and again.
Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland and can be reached at [email protected]. This column is supported by The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.
IF YOU GO
“Painting Energy: The Alex Katz Foundation Collection at the Portland Museum of Art,” at the PMA, 7 Congress Square, Portland, through Sept. 14. Admission is $20 adults, $18 seniors and students 22+, free for members and visitors 21 and under, free to all Fridays 4 to 8 p.m. For more, go to portlandmuseum.org or call 207-775-6148.
