UNLEARNING GENIUS
ALEX KATZ
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEREMY LIEBMAN
INTERVIEW BY LOLA KRAMER
OUT NOW
ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE
ESCAPE TO MIAMI
The most southernly city in the US, Miami exists in the tropical recesses of the American imagination: land of celebrity, thunderstorms, Tony Montana, and Art Deco architecture. Here, we meet the latest generation of Miamians—committed radicals in the fields of art, fashion, and music, who are dreaming up new narratives for the city they call home.
NEW ART: LONDON
The art world’s compulsion to categorize by the yardstick of “hot or not” has historically been the driving force behind the market and the gallery system. Commerce is intertwined with this metric, spurred on by the insatiable appetite to find talented young things to build up. This system is uninteresting: what’s in vogue rarely reflects those operating at the cutting edge. Who are those young emerging artists making work against all odds—work that is difficult and costly to make, store, exhibit, move, and sell? These five individuals typify this path. Working across video, sound, installation, and sculpture, they march onwards, carving out their own niche—exhibiting in empty shop spaces one day and major institutions the next. For them, making is guided by urgency, and persistence is motivated by blind faith.
SARA SADIK
KALEIDOSCOPE hosted a solo exhibition by Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (b. 1994, Bordeaux), in November 2023 at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, with the support of Slam Jam. Inspired by videogames, anime, science fiction, and French rap, Sara Sadik’s work explores the reality and fantasies of France’s Maghrebi youth, addressing issues of adolescence, masculinity, and social mythologies. Her work across video, performance, and installation often centers on male characters, using computer-generated scenarios to transform their condition of marginalization into something optimistic and poetic.
FROM THE SHOP
FROM THE ARCHIVE
MANIFESTO
In 2023, from June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound. The 2024 edition will run from June 21 to June 23.
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft. The 2024 edition will run from April 15 to April 21.
Born in New York, where he still lives and works, Alex Katz has been painting for 78 years. Across these decades, he’s maintained a revelatory and playful eye for the essence of the image: whether it’s a landscape, a self-portrait, flowers, his wife, or images appropriated from advertising, there’s a glossy, stylized truth at the heart of the work.
LOLA KRAMER
At this point in your career, where do you find yourself?
ALEX KATZ
Today doesn’t seem much different than yesterday. I work every day. I get bored, and do new things. But I’ve done that all my life.
LK
What are you working on now?
AK
I’m mostly working on Four Seasons landscapes I started in the summer, and I’m about halfway finished with them.
LK
These paintings are massive. We’re totally surrounded by them.
AK
Well, it’s like an environmental landscape. Originally, landscapes were like holes in the wall, more or less, and you see them in the distance. And these landscapes are meant to wrap around you.
LK
They’re immersive. Almost like Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51).
AK
Yeah, it goes around you. The old abstract painters had to find a way to get around Picasso and Matisse, and they went into the large scale, and I followed them with figurative painting. You couldn’t compete with them on their scale.
LK
What part of your process excites you the most? Is it the moment you’re inspired to paint something, is it the time you spend in front of the canvas, or is it when you see the work installed?
AK
The first fifteen minutes of making the painting.
LK
I’ve been thinking about landscape painting a lot recently, and I’d like to know how you have seen the history of landscape painting evolve.
AK
Well, Jacob van Ruisdael was as good as anybody who ever painted, and his work is all landscapes. His paintings were big romances. And then you have Rembrandt’s landscape drawings, which are quite phenomenal. That’s the beginning of it, anyway. But mostly, early Western paintings didn’t come out of the landscape. They came out of the Church, the Church wanted stories, and the priests wanted the same for their house. It’s really with the bourgeoisie that you get the beginning of landscape painting. People were making money and they wanted paintings, and that’s where the landscape painting evolved. And then I think it changed again in the 19th century, when they invented tubes of paint and artists went out into the fields to paint, and that made landscape painting quite different again.
LK
And I think I’ve read that, for you, painting outside changed everything.
AK
At Skowhegan, I went out and painted, and in doing so, I was connected with myself. The paintings weren’t really that good, but I was connected. And that’s when I decided to go for it. When I started painting after art school, I started painting from photographs, because they were flat. I was doing photographs and landscapes. But it was the act of painting from my unconscious, outside, that was the connection. I was painting really quick—I wasn’t even thinking.
LK
When you were painting outside in the landscape, you were accessing a particular part of your unconscious mind?
AK
Yeah—I wasn’t even thinking. In art school, I used to make drawings and then put the drawings on the canvas and paint. It was very deliberate, and it was semi-abstract.
LK
Then you developed the idea of the “quick thing passing?”
AK
Well, that and letting the unconscious free. Which comes from surrealism and the automatic. I think it’s similar to Pollock.
LK
Have you ever done any dream paintings?
AK
When I was young, I tried them. I’d have a dream and see a painting and try to paint it, and they came out awful. I learned my lesson.
LK
You have said “if you try too hard for a likeness, you lose your painting.” Can you tell me about that?
AK
That refers to seeing the painting whole or seeing it piece by piece. If the likeness is determined piece by piece it might not be a good painting.
LK
So how do you work with your models? Do you know what kind of image you have in mind before you have someone sit for you?
AK
The model is generally a social type, so that’s half of it right there. I try to keep it in the world of contemporary art.
LK
Do you already know how you’d like them to pose?
AK
It depends. If it’s a professional, like an actress or a very good professional model, they can determine the pose; I work with them a bit, but they know what they want. For everyone else, I tell them how to pose.
LK
What do you think makes painting timeless?
AK
Painting is like fashion: it’s not timeless. Painting has to have the energy of fashion, and fashion just comes and goes—it doesn’t get any better.
LK
But when you started out, your work wasn’t fashionable.
AK
I had to believe in myself. And it was an “either I do it, or I die” kind of thing.
LK
I read some of your writing recently. In your 1961 text “Brand New and Terrific,” you wrote something about time in a way that has stuck with me. You said, “Eternity exists in minutes of absolute awareness. Painting, when successful, seems to be a synthetic reflection of this condition ... To communicate the condition of awareness into the traditional form of painting is perhaps what I’m after.” How does the act of painting “communicate the condition of awareness?”
AK
You’re trying to paint in the present tense and you’re trying to release your unconscious to do the work.
LK
Did you specifically know that you were going to do figuration at the moment when abstract expressionism was the prevalent thing?
AK
Well, I thought it would come back to figuration. I didn’t have any doubt about that. And I wanted to make a post-abstract painting. I didn’t want to deny it. I think the abstract paintings hold up very well. Malevich’s Black Square is one of the best paintings I’ve ever seen in my life. But he painted that over 120 years ago. And you can’t deny that it’s now part of the cultural heritage of art. But you live in another time period. That was then; this is now.
LK
So, if good painting is like fashion, and it comes and goes, how have you maintained a career that’s spoken to audiences for decades?
AK
Well, the initial contact with painting went right through me. That’s what I believed in. It’s all just instinctive. It’s not rational. I was going to do it. That’s all there was to it. I wasn’t going to change my idea of painting, although the ways I paint kept evolving. I started painting open; then, the paintings got pre-planned, because I wanted to do compositions. And the compositions entailed drawing and pre-planning, and the reference points were different. Barnett Newman is like Monet: they are arrangements. They get a motif, and they arrange it. And the other side is Picasso and de Kooning. They make an image to tear it down and paint it up again, and it gets very refined that way. It was completely different from what I started out with. And that evolved for a while. Then, it got boring. I went back to the things I was doing in 1949 and 1950.
LK
What was that?
AK
The sensation paintings.
LK
Sensational because they make you feel an emotion?
AK
Well, yeah, but all good painting does that. A great painting does that to you. The thing is, if a painting really hits you, it’s better than the sunset.
LK
Have you ever experienced Stendhal syndrome? It’s a phenomenon when you see an artwork, and it affects you so deeply that you experience physical and psychic phenomena, even hallucinations.
AK
I fainted at the first Matisse show. I couldn’t believe anyone could paint that well.
LK
Where was that?
AK
It was in the Matisse Gallery, in 1946. It was those late landscapes, late interiors. I caught myself before I hit the ground. Matisse is technically out of sight.
LK
One of the most impressive things I’ve seen Matisse do is this interior space in a still life of the goldfish on the table. And the way the goldfish is reflecting from all sides in the water.
AK
Technically, I think what Vermeer does and Rembrandt does, he does it much easier. He’s on that level. I think he’s the greatest technician ever. And so, you realize you can’t compete with him on his turf, but you can go where he can’t go, and he can’t do a big landscape.
LK
I’ve never seen a Matisse giant landscape like this, Alex.
AK
No. And Picasso can’t get over six feet. He’s dynamite in his range, but he can’t go into the grand painting like those Venetians.
LK
Do you have a favorite Matisse painting?
AK
There are so many paintings he’s done that are so fantastic. I think he was his best, actually, in 1912, when he was doing those early interiors. I don’t think anyone topped him in the 20th century. He did a whole bunch of fantastic paintings.
LK
What do you think of the cutouts?
AK
I thought, as fashion, they were on top, and I thought he put a lid on Pollock as the number one high fashion. And I think they were a big influence here, and they influenced me.
LK
Sometimes artists are making work that no one understands when it comes out, and it could take decades for people to recognize its importance.
AK
Sure. Well, that’s happened with me. I mean, at one point people didn’t understand a lot of my work, but they get it now.
LK
You were working on the figure when it wasn’t popular, and your peers, like Rauschenberg and Pollock, were doing other things. But you persisted. And then, there was the moment when Pop Art became something else. And I read that Roy Lichtenstein said, at one point, “All right, Alex, now you’re ahead of the curve.”
AK
Fairfield Porter brought Lichtenstein to my studio. And he said, “He’s a guy working similar to you—go look at his work.” And I could either follow him or do my own thing. And I decided to go my way. And that was it with Lichtenstein.
LK
Is that around the same moment that you became friends with Frank O’Hara?
AK
Yeah, it was all the same moment. I was very fashionable in 1958 and 1959. And Frank picked up on it, came to my studio, and bought two paintings. He never bought anyone else’s paintings. He was more secure with me than I was. I was wobbling. I was doing these new paintings and I thought they were the best I could do, but I didn’t know whether they were any good.
LK
He came by your studio, and what did he say?
AK
He came; he didn’t say much. At four in the morning once, he was at my studio, and he started on this harangue. I was painting these outdoor paintings at that point, and I did Large Head of Ada (1972–1973), and he said, “You shouldn’t be doing this in your paintings.” I told him, “Listen Frank, I know how good I am,” and he said, “Don’t get snotty with me. You’re going to have to hang next to Matisse.”
LK
What did you think of Frank O’Hara’s curatorial work?
AK
He wasn’t conservative. Frank had an idea of style, and it went like this: Tennessee Williams is the marker; anything better than Tennessee Williams is great art, and everything else is crap. That’s what he really thought. The only people he liked were Hart Crane and Walt Whitman. But it was a curatorial style that he was interested in. His shows were not successful as great art, but they had the style of the times, and it had to do with embracing what was new. That’s what Frank was. And his writing, people didn’t take seriously, but, 50 years later, it holds up.
LK
How would you define “style” in general?
AK
That has to do with being alive at the time you’re doing it.
LK
But there are tons of people who are painting without style.
AK
That’s another story. That was like Fairfield [Porter]. He wasn’t interested in style. People do what they can. And Fairfield’s work has no style at all. And that’s what’s nice about it. It’s all styled down to nothing. It becomes a virtue, in the paintings.
LK
Everyone I spoke to before coming to interview you wanted to know what you felt about what you painters are doing now, the generation of kids in their 20s and 30s.”
AK
There’s a tremendous amount of energy and activity going on with the young painters, and, considering New York is so expensive, it’s amazing. And the museums are so out of it. Museums to the young painters are disgraceful. But they paint; they don’t go to the museums that much, most of them. The art world seems to be in transition. All the art from the last 40, or 50 years is out of style and out of fashion. There’s a big vacuum in the art world right now. There seems to be some energy and a lot of people who are painting figurative in the last 10, 20 years, and most of it hasn’t got too much style.
LK
There are a lot of younger painters at the moment painting figuratively and specifically in reference to portrayals of identity.
AK
Identity was last year’s hope. It’s gone. But we made a foundation. When you’re in art school, it’s like heaven. And then, three years later, it’s pretty good. Then it gets very rough. So, the foundation was buying young people’s work and giving it to museums to show. And museums need it. Provincial museums, in particular, could use some life. The public gets to see it, the artists get some money, and it’s a deal all around.
LK
What is the best advice you can give to a young painter?
AK
Don’t deny any experience. Work hard all the time.
LK
I wanted to ask you about your public artwork. I think the first public artwork that you did was in Times Square in 1972.
AK
That was a lot of fun. I liked the big billboards, and it’s like, where are your sources in painting? And the billboards were one of my sources when I started doing these big heads. And I liked the velocity of the de Kooning or [Franz] Kline and I wanted to make a figurative painting that would hold up to theirs, and I did. It was 250 feet long and 60 feet high. It took me three months to do it. I wanted it to feel like motion, like the horses on the Pantheon. The structure comes from the Pantheon. I had to come in every several weeks to see whether the halftones held.
LK
I can also see the influence of billboard advertisements in your Coca-Cola work and then the Calvin Klein girls.
AK
Oh yeah. We’re showing the Calvin Klein-paintings in Rome now. Calvin Klein did more, socially, for more people than anyone, except maybe Ralph Lauren.
It is a social thing, but Calvin Klein made every kid with pimples in high school feel he was part of the flow. You put on a pair of Calvin Klein’s, and you think you’re with it. It is a really big deal for people, the way they made them feel. It made people feel good about themselves. And I think high fashion doesn’t do that. I mean, some kid who is out of it, can’t think that.
You know?
LK
It’s like anyone can do that. And the same goes for Coca-Cola. Can you tell me about your relationship with Gavin Brown?
AK
After I left Pace, I spent 11 months without a gallery. And then, one week later, Gavin and someone from Gagosian called me. And I thought about it for a while, and I took Gavin over Gagosian because I’d been seeing him since he opened his gallery on Broome Street, and I liked his style. And he’s noncommercial, really. And I thought that was what I wanted. And I wanted someone who paid attention to what I’m doing, and he does that. So, we’ve had a lot of fun. We’ve been together for 12 years.
LK
Yeah, I saw the show in 2017 in Harlem.
AK
The Harlem shows were pretty terrific.
LK
Really terrific. And you did three floors?
AK
Yeah, three floors of it. Gavin doesn’t think commercially; it’s all about style. And I’m with him. He has these ideas that are kind of crazy, and I followed along with him. Gavin has a church in Rome that used to be an automobile repair place. And the idea of this thing with Calvin Klein and flowers, it’s definitely a non-commercial one. And in Rome too. The Romans are more interested in chairs than they are in paintings.
LK
I can really see your influence on younger painters. I’ve seen a lot of people try to do a lot of things that you’ve done.
AK
I think as a stylist ... In the last school, one-third of the students were painting like me. But it’s always been that way. People copy me. LI was asked once whether I was in the Whitney and I said, “Yeah, there are four pictures of mine, but they were done by other people.” And it’s true, man. Four other artists took a lot of my stuff.
LK
Something that many of your fans would like to hear about is your paintings of your wife. And you’ve done over 1,000?
AK
We saw a photo of her yesterday from when she was 21. And she’s as beautiful as any woman in the United States in that photo. She’s like a movie star, and she dresses impeccably. Most women don’t learn how to dress until they are in their late 20s, and she was dressed well even when she was five.
It’s unusual to know anyone dressed that well. Her parents liked her and took her to the movies with them, and she absorbed all the gestures from the movies. She never makes a bad gesture; she’s like an actress.
LK
And I also know that sometimes you’ll have her come into the studio and you’ll ask her what she thinks.
AK
Her taste is impeccable. And someone said it’s a moral code. But my father had impeccable taste, and it’s tied into morals somehow.
LK
I have a postcard of a painting you made of Ada on my fridge [Blue Umbrella I (1972)]. Can you tell me about that painting?
AK
It’s a romance picture. It’s a romantic image like in the movies.
LK
I love the glistening of her eyes in this painting.
AK
I didn’t think it was that good when I did it. I thought it was pretty good but I didn’t think it was as good as other people do. Because, when you do a painting, you never know where it is actually. Then people tell me what they think. I think that is one of the most popular things I ever did. People love it.
LK
It’s really incredible. You capture something that is soulful. There’s an emotion to it that ... It feels like time has stopped and stands still and that it’s a fleetingmoment, but you made sure to capture it.
AK
I was shocked at the response to that painting, actually.
LK
Really?
AK
I had this big double portrait of Anne Waldman in the same show. It was 18 feet across. I thought that was the top painting, but it turned out that this one was.
LK
Did you take a photograph, or how did you capture that one moment in the rain?
AK
I don’t know where the idea for the image came from, but she was posing in the shower.
LK
I didn’t know that.
AK
I didn’t know how to paint rain.
Developing a unique approach to contemporary representational painting during his seven-decade career, Alex Katz (b. 1927, New York) is one of the most celebrated American painters of his generation. His upcoming solo exhibition will be on view at Gladstone Gallery, New York, from 9 November 2023– 20 January 2024.
Lola Kramer is a writer, curator, and editor based in New York.
PHOTOGRAPHY: JEREMY LIEBMAN