Alex Katz: Give Me Tomorrow Alex Katz on Painting: Masterpieces

24 Pages·2012·1.98 MB·English

Alex Katz: Give Me Tomorrow

6 October 2012 – 13 January 2013
Alex Katz on Painting:
Masterpieces from Tate
6 October 2012 – 20 January 2013
Free admission

Eleuthera, 1984, Oil on Canvas, 3050 x 6705mm
© Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

A free resource for teachers and group
leaders to use alongside the exhibitions
Introduction to the Exhibitions:

Alex Katz is one of the most important and prolific living American painters. He
had his first solo show in 1954 and has since then carved out a distinct style,
often going against the ‘fashion’ of the time, for example eschewing Abstract
Expressionism at its height. He has been influential not only on visual art, but
also fashion, style, music and theatre throughout his career. He is now 85, and
his latest exhibition, Give Me Tomorrow, at Turner Contemporary explores themes
including family portraits, friends and social relationships, style and the
American Dream, flowers, seascapes and beach life.

The majority of the exhibition is made up of paintings – usually on a very large
scale. Katz's process involves making small studies from life, which he scales up
using the traditional charcoal cartoon and pinhole 'pouncing' method, then paints
the final large scale work in one go, working ‘wet on wet,’ quickly painting without
waiting for previous layers of paint to dry before applying the next. We are also
exhibiting some of his collages, and a rare ‘cut out’ made from oil paint on
aluminium.

When he started making artworks in 1950s America, it was a time when many
artists were working in the Abstract Expressionist style. Alex Katz differed
greatly. He made work that was typically bold, flat and colourful with distinct
lines. His subject tended to be the cultural context of New York style, fashion
and glamour.

Katz has lived between New York and Maine, in New England, for much of his life.
He works in both places – over the course of his career his style and practice has
remained unmistakeable but has been through many changes. We are showing
early work from the 1950s and early 1960s, including family portraits and
landscapes, small works, often studies for larger-scale paintings, images of
landscapes, seascapes, flowers, family and friends that span the 1960s to 2000,
cut-out paper collages made with flat shapes and colour, large-scale paintings
depicting waves, light and boats, a large four-panel work, Eleuthera, which
invites comparisons between art, fashion, lifestyle and advertising, and recent
work in a graphic, colourful style, some shown for the first time this year,
including work very recognisable as homage to the French Impressionist painter
Monet (1840 – 1926).

Alex Katz, like JMW Turner, has many interests beyond visual art which inform his
practice. He is particularly passionate about poetry, jazz music, theatre and
dance. He has worked as a set and costume designer for, among other things,
Avant Garde dance productions. From an early age he was encouraged to
consider what was ‘stylish’ – something that has stayed with him throughout the
rest of his life and career. This pre-occupation with style comes through strongly
in Katz’s work and is identifiable in much of the exhibition.

In the West Gallery you will find works that Alex Katz has selected from the Tate
collection to accompany the exhibition of his works. He was invited to take a
closer look at the collection and choose a group of works or artists that have been
important to him over the years. There is no particular theme to the works; Alex
Katz says, ‘I mostly chose work that I wanted to look at. It wasn’t a question of
selecting the best work or the best painting by that artist.’

This is a fantastic chance to see an artist’s work alongside work by the artists
who have inspired him. It is a great opportunity to consider how we learn from
each other, what we borrow and copy from others, and how we adapt and reflect
on our work in comparison to our peers and those we learn from.

We suggest that you use open questions in the exhibition to begin to discuss
these themes, there are examples of generic questions below and more detailed
activities towards the end of the resource. Questions and activities are in purple:
- What does this artwork remind you of?
- What is your first reaction to this artwork?
- How does it make you feel?
- Is it hot or cold?
- Is it happy or sad?
- What was the artist thinking about when making it?
- How does the shape of the work make you feel?
- How else could you look at this artwork?

Your visit:

‘The staff who ran the workshops and conducted the gallery session were expert
and incredibly professional. The range and pace of activities was totally
appropriate for the age and needs of the learners who greatly enjoyed and
benefitted from the day.’
Stephen Dove, Deputy Head, The North School, Ashford.

We Are Curious is Turner Contemporary’s Learning programme. We aim to
embrace students’ curiosity about contemporary art, and encourage it to grow
into confident and critical discussion of artists and their work. We offer a range
of activities for schools and community groups to book, from ‘hands-on
philosophy’ tours with our trained team, discussion sessions using our handling
collections, to practical sessions which explore the practice of exhibiting artists.
You are also welcome to lead your own visit, using our free resources for support.
We ask all groups to make a booking with us if they are intending to visit. To do
so, please email [email protected] and we’ll aim to get back to you
within three days. Turner Contemporary is open Tuesday – Sunday 10.00 – 18.00
and is closed on Mondays except Bank Holidays.
Give Me Tomorrow Key Works:

North Gallery
Ada, 1959, Oil on Masonite, 610 x 610mm
© Alex Katz/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Katz made his first painting of Ada in 1957 and they married the following year.
For the next six decades she became an ever-evolving motif in his work.
Sometimes she is shown in intimate, naturalistic settings: their home, a beach,
with friends. At others she becomes a kind of icon, standing for a more universal
idea of beauty or femininity.

This early work shows the beginnings of Katz’s use of bold blocks of colour – have
a look at the ‘lines’ in the work. Are they defined? Where do they begin and end?
Is Ada central in the work? Is she symmetrical? Is this important? How does it
change the way you feel about the work?
Islesboro Ferry Slip, 1976, Oil on Linen, 1980 x 2134mm
© Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Katz’s compositions often depict his family and friends in carefully staged
groupings and poses. Islesboro Ferry Slip shows his son, Vincent, walking down a
jetty with a friend. It is easy to date this picture: Katz’s attention to clothing and
fashion give it a powerful sense of time and place. Islesboro is a Katz family
holiday spot, an island close to Katz’s home in Maine where he spends his
summers. This depiction of leisure time, time spent relaxing on holiday and
apparently at ease, recurs in Katz’s paintings. He has made many pieces of work
showing the seaside, and beach scenes, making his work particularly resonant
here in Margate – famous as a seaside leisure resort.
Eleuthera, 1984, Oil on Canvas, 3050 x 6705mm
© Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Eleuthera is one of the largest works Katz has made and takes its title from an
island in the Bahamas where Katz holidayed in the 1980s. Like many of Katz’s
large group portraits, the complex composition of this painting is carefully
planned in advance – Katz made several sketches of the composition of
individual panels before painting the finished work rapidly, in one concentrated
session. In the early 1980s Katz brought influences from high fashion into his
work – indeed Eleuthera has the look of a fashion shoot. In fact, the female
bathers depicted are Katz’s family and friends. In the 1970s, Katz had made a
huge work which looked very much like an advertising campaign in Times Square
(a large, famous landmark in New York – like Piccadilly Circus in London.) Katz
admits that moving from making huge advertising billboards to working with high
fashion was not easy, ‘I found it challenging to transform the rawness of
advertising into a fine art object…Eleuthera was four panels, each with two
women in Kamali bathing suits.’1

1 Alex Katz, Invented Symbols, Cantz Verlag, Germany, 1997, p86
Black Hat (Bettina), 2010, Oil on Linen, 1524 x 2134mm
© Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Image courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris – Salzburg

Black Hat (Bettina) continues Katz’s lifelong interest in ‘faces’, painted big and
up close. Katz has said, ‘the heads got bigger and bigger, and I had to make
sketches for them. I couldn’t paint them directly.’2 It was at the end of the 1960s
that Katz first used the traditional technique of ‘pouncing’ to transfer his
sketches onto canvas. Despite her glamorous look, Bettina retains an
awkwardness found in Katz’s most compelling works, giving them an unsettling
edge, a degree of resistance to being easily assimilated or categorised. Katz
describes himself as very accurate on three things: ‘light, clothes and people’.
This monumental portrait sums up these on-going commitments. It is part of a
series of paintings showing male and female models posed in a black floppy hat
against a vibrant yellow background.

Looking at Ada, Islesboro Ferry Slip, Eleuthera and Bettina – who, or what, do you
think makes a good muse, or model? Should it be someone you know? Someone
you love? Yourself?

Why not explore other artists who have made many works using a muse? Do they
all have something in common?

2 Op Cit, p81
Coleman Pond, 1975, Cut Out, Oil Paint on Aluminium, 2410 x 4110mm
Collection of the artist

Alex Katz made his first cut out in 1959. Literally cut out, painted silhouettes in
wood or aluminium, these freestanding portraits sit somewhere between painting
and sculpture whilst also emphasising the flatness of Katz’s paintings on canvas.
This rarely exhibited three-part cut-out of canoeing figures is based on an earlier
series of paintings which show the same figures canoeing towards and away from
the viewer. Coleman Pond of the title is in Linconville, Maine, where Katz has had
a holiday home since the 1950s.
South Gallery

Homage to Monet 9, 2009, Oil on Linen, 3048 x 2438mm
© Alex Katz/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

This painting revisits Claude Monet’s classic motif of water lilies (a recurring
motif in his work, mostly painted between 1899 and the early 1900s when Monet
had a lily pond in his garden at Giverny, France), but in Katz’s distinctive visual
language. Katz has spoken and written at length about French painting, including
Monet. Here he refers explicitly to Impressionism and its on-going influence, but
with notable differences; he remarks in an Impressionist painting the light is
‘slower, more diffuse’; in Katz’s painting it is sharp, strong, graphic and quick,
like a flashbulb.
Seagull, 2010, Oil on Linen, 2134 x 1524mm
© Alex Katz/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
This painting gives an idea of the massive scale on which Katz makes some of his
work. It is particularly pertinent to Margate: Is a seagull a beautiful bird? Does
the painting change the way you think about them?