The Rockwell of the Intelligentsia

By ROBERT HUGHES

A taste for Alex Katz's work is easily acquired, but is it obligatory? After reading what has been written about the Katz retrospective that opened last month at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art, one would think so. The reviews and catalog essays thus far have favorably compared him with Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Jackson Pollock, Frederic Remington, Caspar David Friedrich, Cole Porter and Fred Astaire. "Katz's astonishing achievement," writes Curator Richard Marshall in the catalog, "is to have reconciled abstraction and realism in post-World War II America."

There is no doubt that Katz, at 58, is one of the few painters who are equally popular with critics and the public in America; he is, judging by the affection his work seems to evoke, the Norman Rockwell of the intelligentsia. To doubt the ultimate value of Katz might be construed as a vote against sunny lawns, clean, eager profiles, bright lakes, East Hampton parties, pretty women in lofts, long marital attachment and, above all, style--in short, against everything that makes the arts-and-leisure section of American life such a nice place to be.

Which heaven forfend! The stylishness and power of impact of Katz's work are not in doubt. Over the years he has come up with a way of doing quite a lot with limited plastic means. His sources are largely those of Pop art: the quickly seen, iconic, coercive imagery of mass media, which he then modifies and softens with high-art references. His main subject is the human face, close up and cropped by the frame, a pearly or tanned mask of flat paint with schematic shading, great swacking eyelashes and lipstick-colored lips: it is the face of advertising, the size of an image on a '50s highway billboard shifted into the context of domesticity. Much of the time the face belongs to his wife Ada, whose liquid brown, slightly melancholy eyes and handsomely curved nose recur in image after image, making her one of the most pervasive "presences" in American art since Marilyn Monroe. Ada makes an early appearance in a black sweater, with the characteristic level stare, in 1957; by 1972, in Blue Umbrella No. 2, she is a creature of formidable glamour, radiating a Monica Vitti-esque wistfulness in the rain (the slightly blurred expression is given by the three highlighted dots on each pupil), her pink and red scarf an homage to Bronzino, a raindrop neatly mimicking a tear on her cheek. Katz can also be very good at holding large areas of color in strict, hushed equilibrium (the "abstract" side of his work); two of the best paintings in this show are of birchbark canoes, their graceful forms doubled in reflection, riding on even fields of green and blue.

Granted the zippy registration of Katz's style and his constant ingenuity at fitting stacks of faces into difficult and mannered formats, given his bonhomie and sense of the social moment, the freshness of his color and the adroitness with which he makes his art-historical references--all this admitted, why does this show produce so unmistakable an aftertaste of satiation and deja vu? Katz's fans like to stress that his paintings are "deceptively simple," as though some mass of knotted thought lurked beneath their surfaces. But in fact, what you see is what you get, and his repertoire of compositional tricks, though effective, is not very wide. The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself, and Katz has a near Warholian indifference to meaning: "I'd like to have style take the place of content, or the style be the content . . . I prefer it to be emptied of meaning, emptied of content." This is known as having your abstract cake and eating it too.

The problem is not, as one sometimes hears, that Katz "paints the same thing over and over": everyone has his list of great artists who have done that, from Cezanne laboring at Montagne Ste.-Victoire to Morandi with his dusty bottles. It is that Katz is a poor draftsman. He seems not to look at anything but the painting, and so repeats the same stereotypes for the human face and body, for houses and dogs, steering wheels and tables, and everything else that he puts in his big, clean, post-Hopperish spaces. The idea of drawing as scrutiny of a subject, as a struggle with its strangeness and resistances, is quite alien to the pharaonic prettiness of his art. Of the structure, weight, pathos and energy of the human body he has no sense at all, and one result is his inability (shown in paintings like His Behind the Back Pass, 1979, two wooden Frisbee players on a lawn) to do a simple figure in movement. His colloquialisms let him down; arms become sticks, hands a mere bunch of squarish twigs, feet relate badly or not at all to the ground, while faces, most of the time, are little more than masks.

This show fails to suggest that Katz was ever interested in anything beyond the most generalized form of his human subjects. He may draw figures better than Milton Avery, but that is not saying much. The late-'50s portraits of Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Taylor and Norman Bluhm are, as portraiture, thin and perfunctory; for a quick check on what a first-rate American draftsman could do with the human face as a focus of inquisitorial attention, one could have done worse than visit West 57th Street after leaving the Whitney to catch the show of Ellsworth Kelly's portrait drawings at the Blum Helman Gallery. Perhaps only in America, where the cultural role of depictive drawing was so quashed and ghettoized by a quarter-century of "official" abstraction, could Katz be seen as a draftsman of any special quality. One would not wish to begrudge him his work with absurdly exalted claims of kinship with Degas, Velazquez or, for that matter, Fred Astaire.