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Lot Essay
“You stepped out of a dream
You are too wonderful to be what you seem”
(Epigraph to R. Padgett poem, You Stepped Out, which accompanies Alex Katz: Twelve Paintings, exh. cat. PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York, 2004, p. 9)
As strikingly enigmatic as its subject, Alex Katz’s Tilda is an arresting example of the portraits of beautiful, elegant women for which the artist is most celebrated. Monumental in scale and striking for its stylized simplicity and meticulous brushwork, the composition demonstrates the coolly glamorous, representational painting that Katz has mastered since beginning his career in the New York art scene of the 1950s. At that time, the Abstract Expressionists led the artistic vanguard and, while inspired by the forceful impact of their works, Katz challenged their insistence on pure abstraction by focusing on the human figure. Meanwhile, his creation of boldly colored, cropped paintings in the manner of commercial billboards prefigured Pop Art. And yet Katz has always remained independent from any particular art movement. As David Antin, an American poet, artist and critic, has observed of his works, in their cool, detached, exquisite rendering, which equivocate between representation and abstraction, “they are the paintings of a dandy” (D. Antin, “Alex Katz and the Tactics of Representation,” Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005, Chicago, 2011, p. 24).
Tilda was one of a series of twelve paintings that Katz completed in 2004, and that were first exhibited later that same year. Ten of the canvases featured portraits of prominent, talented women, including the artist Cindy Sherman, Katz’s wife and muse, Ada, and, in the present work, the British actor Tilda Swinton (the other two new works were landscapes). Each portrait is similarly pared back, stylized, and more than life size, iconizing its subject as the not-quite-attainable individual invoked in one of the poems by Ron Padgett that were printed in the accompanying catalogue. But such is Katz’s conceptual boldness and remarkable technical skill that the physicality of the paintings, beyond their subject matter, provokes the same disbelieving response. On this matter of appearances, and their deceptiveness, Tilda Swinton is the perfect model.
Aside from being highly respected as an actor of keen intellect, in art house and independent films, as well in mainstream movies, Swinton is known for her striking, androgynous looks and her sartorial style. She has modeled for prestigious fashion brands such Chanel and is feted in the fashion world. Swinton has also collaborated on performance-art installations. For instance, in The Maybe Swinton lay as though asleep while enclosed in a glass box, a performance piece that was first presented in 1995 at London’s Serpentine Gallery and was most recently revived at MoMA in 2013. Yet, for all her ties to Hollywood and fashion, she lives quite distanced from these milieus in the Highlands of Scotland. These ambiguities, and the slipperiness of identity, are themes Swinton has examined throughout her career. She is, after all, still closely identified with her role as the gender-changing protagonist of the 1992 movie Orlando. A similar focus on the vicissitude of being and of appearance, and on the visual possibilities when abstraction and representation combine, informs Katz’s Tilda.
Tilda is an extreme close-up of its subject, with only a sweep of black paint referencing the cloth of Swinton’s outfit. While Katz beautifully captures the elegant folds of the luxurious material, its placement against the white background, and the precise clarity of line where it meets the sitter’s neck and collarbone, lend the black shape an abstract quality. A similar focus on abstraction is evident in the rest of the portrait. He depicts her famously angular features, her blue eyes, with their pale lashes and brows, and the sweep of her hair. Presented in three-quarter-view profile, the rest of her figure curtailed, the portrait feels incredibly intimate. Swinton appears lost in thought, her eyes look into the distance, and her lips are parted. And yet the meticulously rendered head is modeled through patches of light and shade that can be read as much as patches of pure paint as bone structure and flesh. A raking light illuminates the figure, but it does not dispute that it is bathed in pigment. This focus on surface is further emphasized by the shallow depth of the composition and the crisp lines that delineate Swinton’s features, such as around her mouth, at the corners of her nose, and upon her eyelids. The effect is magnified by the way in which her right eye is placed almost parallel to the picture plane, becoming an essential part of the painting-object as it is of its subject. By vacillating between the real and the formal, Katz’s sumptuous painting deliberates on the equivocal nature of appearance. And as much as the portrait captures the ethereal beauty of Tilda Swinton, it expresses the similarly captivating quality of the painting that is Tilda.
You are too wonderful to be what you seem”
(Epigraph to R. Padgett poem, You Stepped Out, which accompanies Alex Katz: Twelve Paintings, exh. cat. PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York, 2004, p. 9)
As strikingly enigmatic as its subject, Alex Katz’s Tilda is an arresting example of the portraits of beautiful, elegant women for which the artist is most celebrated. Monumental in scale and striking for its stylized simplicity and meticulous brushwork, the composition demonstrates the coolly glamorous, representational painting that Katz has mastered since beginning his career in the New York art scene of the 1950s. At that time, the Abstract Expressionists led the artistic vanguard and, while inspired by the forceful impact of their works, Katz challenged their insistence on pure abstraction by focusing on the human figure. Meanwhile, his creation of boldly colored, cropped paintings in the manner of commercial billboards prefigured Pop Art. And yet Katz has always remained independent from any particular art movement. As David Antin, an American poet, artist and critic, has observed of his works, in their cool, detached, exquisite rendering, which equivocate between representation and abstraction, “they are the paintings of a dandy” (D. Antin, “Alex Katz and the Tactics of Representation,” Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005, Chicago, 2011, p. 24).
Tilda was one of a series of twelve paintings that Katz completed in 2004, and that were first exhibited later that same year. Ten of the canvases featured portraits of prominent, talented women, including the artist Cindy Sherman, Katz’s wife and muse, Ada, and, in the present work, the British actor Tilda Swinton (the other two new works were landscapes). Each portrait is similarly pared back, stylized, and more than life size, iconizing its subject as the not-quite-attainable individual invoked in one of the poems by Ron Padgett that were printed in the accompanying catalogue. But such is Katz’s conceptual boldness and remarkable technical skill that the physicality of the paintings, beyond their subject matter, provokes the same disbelieving response. On this matter of appearances, and their deceptiveness, Tilda Swinton is the perfect model.
Aside from being highly respected as an actor of keen intellect, in art house and independent films, as well in mainstream movies, Swinton is known for her striking, androgynous looks and her sartorial style. She has modeled for prestigious fashion brands such Chanel and is feted in the fashion world. Swinton has also collaborated on performance-art installations. For instance, in The Maybe Swinton lay as though asleep while enclosed in a glass box, a performance piece that was first presented in 1995 at London’s Serpentine Gallery and was most recently revived at MoMA in 2013. Yet, for all her ties to Hollywood and fashion, she lives quite distanced from these milieus in the Highlands of Scotland. These ambiguities, and the slipperiness of identity, are themes Swinton has examined throughout her career. She is, after all, still closely identified with her role as the gender-changing protagonist of the 1992 movie Orlando. A similar focus on the vicissitude of being and of appearance, and on the visual possibilities when abstraction and representation combine, informs Katz’s Tilda.
Tilda is an extreme close-up of its subject, with only a sweep of black paint referencing the cloth of Swinton’s outfit. While Katz beautifully captures the elegant folds of the luxurious material, its placement against the white background, and the precise clarity of line where it meets the sitter’s neck and collarbone, lend the black shape an abstract quality. A similar focus on abstraction is evident in the rest of the portrait. He depicts her famously angular features, her blue eyes, with their pale lashes and brows, and the sweep of her hair. Presented in three-quarter-view profile, the rest of her figure curtailed, the portrait feels incredibly intimate. Swinton appears lost in thought, her eyes look into the distance, and her lips are parted. And yet the meticulously rendered head is modeled through patches of light and shade that can be read as much as patches of pure paint as bone structure and flesh. A raking light illuminates the figure, but it does not dispute that it is bathed in pigment. This focus on surface is further emphasized by the shallow depth of the composition and the crisp lines that delineate Swinton’s features, such as around her mouth, at the corners of her nose, and upon her eyelids. The effect is magnified by the way in which her right eye is placed almost parallel to the picture plane, becoming an essential part of the painting-object as it is of its subject. By vacillating between the real and the formal, Katz’s sumptuous painting deliberates on the equivocal nature of appearance. And as much as the portrait captures the ethereal beauty of Tilda Swinton, it expresses the similarly captivating quality of the painting that is Tilda.