Alex Katz’s
Life in Art
August 27, 2018
By Calvin Tomkins
“Alex Katz is on fire. He said so himself, when I visited his studio one day this spring. ‘One thing after another is coming up,’ the ninety-year-old said, flashing a wide smile that transformed his usual expression of slight gloom. His proposal to place a series of cutout sculptures of his wife, Ada, on the median of New York’s Park Avenue had been accepted by the city, and he had been commissioned to enhance the interior of a subway station. ‘I told them a couple of little mosaics in the subway isn’t going to change anything, what you need is an environment—and they went for it,’ he said. Nineteen five-foot-high paintings, transferred to glass by artisans and embedded in the walls, are now turning the F train’s Fifty-seventh Street station into a playground for Katz’s boldly colorful, high-intensity art. ‘I wanted the paintings done on porcelain,’ Katz told me, ‘but the guy said, “Porcelain only lasts twenty-five years. This will last forever...”’ ”