The perpetual movement of Alex Katz at Colby School Museum of Artwork

However endurance is all of the extra notable in his profession, provided that he’s spent the whole thing of it swimming upstream. Katz has all the time gone his personal approach, perpetually dedicated to figures and flowers and scenes, like his hero, Henri Matisse. When the American artwork world tacked sharply into Summary Expressionism within the early Fifties, Katz, then a current graduate of Cooper Union in New York, maintained course; when the present shifted towards Pop Artwork and Conceptualism within the ′60s and ′70s, Katz remained unmoved.

It’s tempting to see him alongside artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, with their shiny colours and reinstatement of the human determine in the primary of American artwork, however any such kinship is barely on the floor. The place Pop ran parallel to Conceptualism with its critiques of consumerism and junk tradition, Katz had no real interest in such socially acutely aware layers; portray was solely about portray, the world in entrance of him dedicated coolly to canvas.

At Colby — the recipient of almost 900 works by the artist, a big share given by Katz himself, a summertime Mainer for nearly 70 years — the exhibition provides a selected slice of his lengthy profession that helps exemplify his against-the-grainness. The present spans six a long time of the artist’s engagement with the theater, for which he’s created costumes, units, and artwork path. The stage is a ardour that is still undimmed: The present consists of work for one in all his first theatrical productions, a set of tiny costume sketches for the Paul Taylor Dance Firm’s “Junction,” in 1961, and big, energetic work of dancers made simply final 12 months.

Katz is nothing if not constant, and virtually unnervingly so: In a giant central gallery, the brand new work could possibly be from 1953, or, spirits prepared, 2030. One wall options work of dancers in movement, fragmented throughout 4 canvases; others are make-up research, dancers’ faces pictured as in a film close-up. All are basic Katz: indifferent, pared down, and elemental. The close-ups really feel particularly primal, the curve of a dancer’s cheek or jaw outlined solely by the crimson, inexperienced, and pale pink of their make-up, aswim on a floor of purple and inky black.

To name them theatrical feels apparent. However like no different painter I do know, Katz creates scenes that, like theater itself, really feel concurrently visceral and contrived. A component of self-conscious efficiency is all the time current in his work, an off-kilter intimacy that seduces and creates distance on the similar time. His work is subtly, achingly irreconcilable — quotidian however otherworldly, indifferent however alluring, with a compositional mastery that units the images on an edge between narrative and pure kind. I have a look at a bit like “Paul Taylor,” 2011, the choreographer and Katz’s frequent collaborator, hung within the exhibition’s introductory antechamber, and I wrestle with the artist’s intent. It’s a portrait, full-bodied, adrift in a monochrome discipline of searing shiny orange. It’s Katz to a tee, minimal and intimate suddenly.

Katz’s lack of curiosity within the strictures of the midcentury American portray scene meant an openness to experiment, mashup, collaboration. That could be why he discovered himself speaking to Taylor in 1960. The choreographer, who had not too long ago left the Martha Graham Dance Firm, had employed the artist Robert Rauschenberg to do his units and costumes; a falling out over a manufacturing of “Meridian” broke their partnership for good. The dance critic (and customary pal) Edwin Denby launched Taylor to Katz, and Katz got here to the rescue.

Through the years, Taylor and Katz would collaborate on 15 productions, Katz offering the visible aura by costume and set through which Taylor’s motion would thrive. Taylor died in 2018, however his firm lives on, and lots of the items they labored on collectively are in repertoire and frequently restaged. In honor of the Guggenheim present, Lincoln Heart in New York will current “Taylor X Katz,” a revival of 4 of their collaborative works on Nov. 9.

Taylor wasn’t Katz’s solely theatrical confrere, however he’s certainly his most important. The present consists of efficiency movie of Taylor’s “Junction,” through which eight dancers in shiny color-block bodysuits designed by Katz navigate the artist’s minimal set. The piece is spare, visceral, and fashionable, however set to the baroque strains of Johann Sebastian Bach; the dancers, for all their muscular fluidity, embody notes of conventional ballet. Taylor and Katz simply matched — fashionable classicists, pushing into the long run with the previous in hand.

Not all the things right here is related to a selected manufacturing; many items are stand-alone work impressed by the colour and type of a dancer’s physique or motion. However every bit reinforces the mooring of Katz’s profession. When American artwork deserted the physique within the Fifties, it made sense that Katz would possibly discover kinship in a medium like dance, intrinsically tied to the human kind.

The artistic friction between two expressive media, one static, one dynamic, underpins Katz’s work. “Personal Area” is a Taylor piece that Katz helped conceive with the suggestion the set be designed round blocking that hid and revealed the dancers’ motion. (It was impressed by observing the various discreet worlds unfolding concurrently within the residences throughout the road from his studio window in New York.)

“Personal Area,” a standout portray within the present from 1969 that’s primarily based on the Taylor piece — dancers at numerous scales clustered and overlapping in opposition to a monochrome floor — is highly effective testomony to the immediacy of Katz’s work extra broadly. It feels performative and constructed, blocked and composed simply so, like fashionable dance itself.

Katz’s work has all the time centered round intensely deliberate composition: “Pas de Deux,” a monumental collection of canvases right here from 1983, of formally dressed {couples} in numerous entanglements in opposition to a pitch-black background, teases with a theatricality that feels seductively, playfully manufactured (the themes had been Katz’s mates, suggestively posed).

That is Katz toying with expectations. Narrative was the area of realism, a realm to which Katz bears no allegiance. In his theatrical departures, Katz discovered a drama suited to his intentions: constructed, outlined, and finite. Nothing exists offstage; in Alex Katz’s world, there may be solely right here and now.

ALEX KATZ: THEATER AND DANCE

At Colby School Museum of Artwork, 5600 Mayflower Hill, Waterville, Maine. By Feb. 19. museum.colby.edu, 207-859-5600.

Murray Whyte could be reached at [email protected]. Observe him on Twitter @TheMurrayWhyte.