Claude Monet, La plage de Trouville, 1870, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London. Image: Scala, Florence.
The subject of Ada is of paramount importance in Katz’s oeuvre; one of the rare painterly realms where content and form are treated in equal measure. The artist’s frst-ever portrait of his wife, an eponymous painting where she is seen sitting in a three-quarter pose, was created a year before the pair got married. Now residing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it presents the model in a serene and introspective infection – refecting Katz’s already well-established perception of Ada, ahead of their shared life. Twenty years on, Blue Umbrella I seems more assured than its predecessor, both in form and content. Ada’s features are delineated with more clarity and conviction, and the colours are distributed more generously throughout the canvas. She is renewed through the sheer force of their intimacy, but also thanks to the technical developments that fourished throughout the 1960s, imbuing the work with a flmic quality which permeates Katz’s work. Presented close-up with an immaculate fnish, the elements that constitute the present painting brim with an irrepressible cinematic gleam, that signals the solidifed shif of Katz’s creative direction. Only adding to the painting’s cinematic efect, Katz has placed the tilted raindrops surrounding Ada strategically, so that some of them appear to be running down her cheeks. As such, she seems to embody the scope, scale and presentation of Michelangelo Antonioni or Federico Fellini’s characters, ‘hardly more a presence than an impact on emptiness’ (Jack Kroll, ‘Reviews and Previews: Alex Katz’, ARTNews, vol. 61, February 1963, p. 11). Despite the painting’s inherent cinematic sheen, and the vitality of Katz’s model, there is something deeply twodimensional about the artist’s style of portraiture. In the 1950s, he was among the frst to reduce the gestural brushwork that pervaded fgurative painting, whilst maintaining the size and scale associated with Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field Abstraction. As such, his compositions bore an ambivalent feel that aligned them with
multifarious styles of painting, namely Pop and Abstraction, whilst retaining a unique formal infection. Here, Katz has employed a rich colour palette and striking contrasts to increase verisimilitude, yet a minimalist sense of fatness comes to the fore. Departing from the New York School’s hazy and energetic fgurative style, Katz developed a clean, graphic, and vibrant visual language, infuenced in part by the aesthetics of billboard advertising, a purely post-modern style that a number of his contemporaries, including Elizabeth Peyton, Peter Doig, David Salle and Richard Prince, are indebted to in their painterly work. Focusing on Ada’s characteristically aggrandised features, the present work is as though glazed, crystalised as an immaculate still, seemingly captured from the reel of a flm. In order to achieve such frozen, glamourised portraits, Katz runs through a minutious process of painting, that usually begins with a rapid pen or pencil drawing. With these preliminary sketches, he defnes a subject or motif – commonly a lone fgure or object in the landscape – and subsequently creates drawings and large-format cartoons that he successively afxes to a primed canvas, and punctures with a tool, before fnally beginning to paint. Fascinated by the endless possibilities of a single image, Katz then cultivates his imagery in varying sizes and colourpalettes. The present image is repeated in larger dimensions in Blue Umbrella II, and fnally published as two sets of lithographs in 1979-1980, in colour and in grayscale. Spotlighting Katz’s favourite subject, Blue Umbrella I is a sumptuous example from the artist’s prodigious painterly opus. It is conceived as an ode to his timeless muse, who, despite continuous changes in American society, remained her elegant self for decades – a feat that Robert Storr dubs ‘the mark of her musedom’ (Robert Storr, Alex Katz Paints Ada, exh. cat., The Jewish Museum, New York, 2007).