An honest painter is one who doesn’t paint very well. Sincere art is art that relies on subject matter to carry it. “You know, pretty girls, flowers, you can’t be serious. “My work is like pablum to them,” he tells me. Even today, Katz’s style is too stripped down for some people, who think it looks easy. His confident, crisply articulated technique makes us see the world the way he sees it, clear and up close, with all but the most essential details pared away. In a Katz painting, style-the way it’s painted-is the primary element. He has always had his own direction, which has not been the direction of mainstream art in any of the last seven decades. In the nineteen-fifties, when most of the serious art being done was abstract, Katz outraged scores of artists and formalist critics by inventing new ways to paint the human figure. He cites Thutmose as one of his favorite artists, right up there with Goya, Manet, and Matisse. Katz is on easy terms with art history, all the way back to Thutmose’s exquisite portrait bust of Queen Nefertiti, circa 1340 B.C., which he’s visited in the Neues Museum, in Berlin. They saw it as a romantic figure, riding from the Black Sea to the Baltic.” It’s a romance image, and for me it has to do with Rembrandt’s ‘The Polish Rider.’ I could never understand that painting, but my mother and Frank O’Hara both flipped over it, so I realized I was missing something. “You know, the blond girl in the red convertible, laughing with unlimited happiness. “That’s Coca-Cola red, from the company’s outdoor signs in the fifties,” Katz explained. The Coca-Cola girls are in white one-piece bathing suits, against red backgrounds. The backgrounds are uniformly dark blue, but the paintings are bathed in light, which emanates from suavely painted areas of bare skin. The most recent were from two new series, which he referred to as “Calvin Klein Girls” and “Coca-Cola Girls.” Katz had seen a video for Calvin Klein underwear while riding in a taxicab, and it had led to a dozen or so very large oil paintings of nubile young women (and a few of young men) in skimpy black underwear. Paintings for several upcoming exhibitions, including a major survey show at the Lotte Museum, in Seoul, were stacked against the walls of Katz’s studio on West Broadway. “I wanted the paintings done on porcelain,” Katz told me, “but the guy said, ‘Porcelain only lasts twenty-five years. Nineteen five-foot-high paintings, transferred to glass by artisans and embedded in the walls, are now turning the F train’s Fifty-seventh Street station into a playground for Katz’s boldly colorful, high-intensity art. “I told them a couple of little mosaics in the subway isn’t going to change anything, what you need is an environment-and they went for it,” he said. His proposal to place a series of cutout sculptures of his wife, Ada, on the median of New York’s Park Avenue had been accepted by the city, and he had been commissioned to enhance the interior of a subway station. “One thing after another is coming up,” the ninety-year-old said, flashing a wide smile that transformed his usual expression of slight gloom. He said so himself, when I visited his studio one day this spring.
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