Alex Katz: Theater and Dance - A Shift in Perspective at The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego +.

 by Patricia Frischer

Originally 38 of these cut out dogs placed on the stage 
had to be navigated by the dancers.

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 subjects , in general, are everyday modern life. His 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 line 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. Their collaboration invented a new way of conceiving of modern dance.  

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 a component of the dance. Paul Taylor was open to this so in the truest sense there was a cross collaboration.  The sets had flat cut outs of objects on painted floors. The lighting flattened the figures and the color blocked costumes gave endless visual variation as the dancers gestured and rotatoed.  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 portraits of  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. 

Detail showing the way the cut outs are layered together to make this composition. 

Detail showing how the front and the back of the costumes were different.
Each turn of the dancer made for a different composition. 

Edwin Denby

Paul Taylor

A sketch for the following painting

It was intentional to cut off the foot, to tilt the figure as if she might fall

Theatrical lighting informs this close up

Economy of line and color allows the works to be upscaled

Amy Crum, Associate Curator MCASD, along with Kathryn Kanjo,
MCASD David C. Copley Director and CEO guided us through the exhibition

As was commented the Alex Katz works in this exhibition are small scale compared to the monumental even billboard size of most of Katz’s work. There is an economy of mark making used at that size, which is totally different to the huge works in the next gallery space by Yan Pei-Ming.  The entire room is filled with these three monumental paintings Yan Pei-Ming: A Burial in Shanghai. The first in honor of the passing of his mother, the second is a modern reinterpretation of  Gustave Courbet’s  A Burial at Ornans (1849-1850). The third representing the heavenly realm. These works debuted at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay in 2019, and this is the first showing in the United States. You have to be in the room with these works to experience the artist's intent of displaying his reaction to the death of this most important person in his life from tribute, to ceremony to after life. 

This is a tribute to the artists mother, who passed in 2028

The burial

The heavenly realm

Just a brief mention for another La Jolla stop. Visit the 33rd Annual Juried Exhibition at the Athenaeum Music and Art Library, jurored by Malcom Warner. It is on view until Oct 18 in the large Joseph Clayes III Gallery

Amy Rosenberg, The Circus Master (1st place)

Lori Mitchell, Waiting (3rd place)

Alex Katz: Theater and Dance, 

Yan Pei-Ming: A Burial in Shanghai 

Both on view until Jan 4, 2026  
The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
700 Prospect St., La Jolla, 92037
Thurs - Sat, 11am - 7pm, Sun 11am - 5pm

33rd Annual Juried Exhibition 
Athenaeum Music and Art Library 
on view until Oct 18, 2026
1008 Wall Street, La Jolla, 92037
Tuesday–Saturday: 10am – 5:30pm