Alex Katz:
Theater and Dance, a comprehensive museum presentation of the artist’s work with the
performing arts on view until Jan 4, 2026 at The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Most who know Alex Katz’s large scale flat
painted compositions are familiar with his portraits and landscapes. His
subject has always been everyday modern life. These works, made when the art world was diving
into abstract expressionism, pretty much ignored that movement by staying
figurative and are considered a precursor to pop art and color field genres. Of
course, the work has abstracted components from real life with paired down choices for link and color. But in the representational work it has gesture, the
basis of most figurative work, and in real life physical gesture is dance.
It turns out that Katz was a social dancer
with his wife Ada. When he was introduced to the modern dancer Paul Taylor by
Edwin Denby the poet and dance critic, Katz was impressed with his athleticism,
intellectual intent and skill. They went on to create 15 productions together. The
collaboration was a new way of seeing modern dance. The sets had flat cut outs of objects on painted
floors. The lighting flattened the figures and with color blocked costumes the motion was put within a context of 2-D space.
When Taylor choreographed, he would put the
same dance to different music scores. He considered the stage a frame. Katz consider that the energy of the dance could also break the frame. Shapes are made in space but are also flat. And everything that moves is a sort of choreography. When we watch, we undergo
a constant shift in perspective.
Katz invented ribbons, sticks, discs, cut outs and even cube structures for the dancers so they related to the space and
brought it alive as component of the
dance. Paul Taylor was open to this so in the truest sense there was a
cross collaboration. In an interview at Colby College in 2022, Alex
Katz said, “Paul said, Alex makes obstacles and I overcome them…I give Paul a
chance for greatness.”
Born in Brooklyn, to Russian
immigrants, Alex Katz studied at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York, and
the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Katz is now in his 90’s
and has worked with a number of different choreographers (Yoshiko Chuma, Laura
Dean, William Dunas, and Parsons) and is still painting dancers. The exhibition, organized by the
Colby College Museum of Art (where there is a wing devoted to his work) and the American Federation of Arts solely
concentrates on Theater and Dance, but Katz has engaged in numerous large scale
public art installations with cut outs and paintings. A retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 2022 filled the
entire building.
This exhibition enables you to see a side of
Alex Katz work never before exhibited with sketches from his private collection.
It can be viewed as a capsule experience on a smaller scale, which gives so much
more insight to his entire body of work. Alex Katz was not
trying to sum up an entire theme in a painting, he was trying to capture
that one moment of interaction between the subject and himself.
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