Alex Katz (artist) American, born 1927 Swamp Maple (4:30), 1968 oil on linen Overall: 365.8 x 236.2 cm (144 x 93 in.) Gift of the Collectors Committee 2008.34.1 |
Although best known for his figure paintings, often set in and around Manhattan, Alex Katz is equally a painter of Maine, where he has summered for decades. Swamp Maple (4:30), painted in Lincolnville, Maine, in 1968, is one of his largest landscapes in every sense—at once monumental and unstable, fast and slow, flat and deep, hard and soft, general and particular, observed and abstract.
Here Katz beautifully captures the glow of weak sun on leaf and water and the contrasting textures of soft grass and rough bark. A delicate craquelure on the tree trunk emerged during the course of painting, and Katz took advantage of it to convey the bark itself. His color choices, such as the tan sky and the white reflection of the black shore, are both memorable and puzzling, leaving the viewer to wonder whether it is 4:30 a.m. or p.m. The former is not out of the question: Katz has said that he wants to explore times that few people have seen, and in Lincolnville, the sun rises that early in the summer. In fact, Katz recalls that the painting was based on oil sketches he made in the afternoon, although the title leaves the time of day ambiguous.
The absence of a viewpoint or standpoint in Swamp Maple (4:30) is aided by radical cropping, a Katz trademark: "A lot of these paintings don't have much of a floor," he remarks slyly, and indeed, the handling of the grass suggests a plane slipping away. Space is deepened by aerial perspective, as seen in the depiction of the pale blue hills, and then drained by the color of the sky, which seems to sit on the surface of the painting, refusing to recede properly into space. The tree is not in the landscape so much as in front of it, perhaps even serving as a stand-in for the artist or the beholder.
Katz steered his own course throughout the 1960s, paying close attention to artists as diverse as Barnett Newman, James Rosenquist, Fairfield Porter, Roy Lichtenstein, and Al Held, a painter with whom he shared studio space in New York for much of the 1960s. Swamp Maple (4:30) rivals the scale of abstract expressionism, borrows the language of hard-edge abstraction, and navigates between the softness of plein-air painting and the slickness of pop art. This work, the most ambitious landscape that Katz had painted up to that point, beautifully realizes his goal of capturing an "overall light" in the "present tense." Although the Gallery's collection is rich with early works on paper by Katz, Swamp Maple (4:30) is the first of his paintings to enter the collection. Together with the new Rosenquist acquisition, it will help to represent American figurative art of the 1960s, which is often overlooked given the struggle at that time between late abstract expressionism and emerging pop and minimalism.