"The more obvious example of undercutting is seen in the ostensibly simple Yellow House... Here we question why the house has been approached from this angle. The lighter brushstrokes draw the eye upward. The little leaves seem to have a life of their own. They are like fish, swimming upward, into the light. The quantity of green seems to suggest a hugeness and solidity, but it is more than a detailed version of a bush or cluster of bushes that grows outside a house. It makes us stop thinking vaguely of that which we call 'nature' and think, instead, of its specifics."
E xtending over nine feet in width, Alex Katz’s Yellow House from 1985 is an all-immersive canvas depicting one of the artist’s most beloved subjects – his summer home in Lincolnville, Maine where he has lived and worked almost every summer since 1954. The present work expertly showcases Katz’s signature painting style, rooted in his stylized representations of everyday life and specific cropping devices. In the mid-1980s, Katz began to shift his attention away from pure portraiture as he explored the many possibilities within landscape painting. Both sunny and charming,Yellow House shows Katz’s yellow-brick house flanked with red lilies and framed by fresh green grass. Meticulously cropping the scene, Katz allows for the yellow structure of the home to become the sole stimulus of the canvas, allowing for light and finessed line to take center stage. Neither romanticized nor sentimental, the stylized and flattened rendering of the yellow house becomes a type of self-portrait, an infused memory of a place so deeply infused with Katz’s life and a constant source of inspiration.
"With me, it’s a lot of light, but it’s analysed Iight. This is really particular and in a lot of paintings, I do different types of light. I do incandescent light, fluorescent light, night light, twilight, daylight, morning, afternoon, and each one is very specific to the time."
Since 1954, Katz and his wife and muse, Ada, have spent nearly every summer at the yellow house depicted in the present work. It is a 200-year-old farmhouse that Katz himself painted in a bold cadmium yellow hue. Maine was already a special place for Katz, as he had studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 1949, following his graduation from the Cooper Union in New York. Emphasizing the significance of his studies in Maine, Katz has explained that at Skowhegan “I tried plein air painting and found my subject matter and a reason to devote my life to painting. The sensation of painting from the back of my head was a high that I followed until the present.” Now aged 94, Katz has painted in Maine for over fifty years and has canvassed nearly every facet of the property as inspiration for his artistic practice – capturing the flora and fauna of the surrounding land as well as certain iconic physical structures such as the house, the pond, the dock and canoe.
In the present work, Katz anchors the composition on a green-paned window enveloped within the flat maze of yellow brickwork. The perspective is intimate, focusing on just one corner of the home and denying any sense of real scale of the scene. A patch of red lilies jut out from the left corner of the composition, flattened against the side of the house. The flowers are specifically cut off at the bottom, shown without roots or the foundation of a flower bed, and thus serve a purpose of further obfuscating the viewer’s perception of scale and size. The sprouting lilies and the bright hue of the grass suggest it is early summer in Maine, with the landscape still in a season of growth and vegetation. It is both the inclusion and absence of clues in Katz’s paintings that continue to draw our eye in as viewers and captivate our attention long after our initial impression of the scene. Here, Katz sprinkles small hints at the narrative yet still denies a more complete interpretation of the scene, creating a fascinating push-pull in our engagement with the subject matter. This sense of mystery – of inclusion and omittance in the details – is perhaps best encapsulated in the abstracted brushwork within the window pane that beckons the questions: Who is home? What is inside?
Determined to pioneer a style that differentiated him from his contemporaries, Katz’s interest in scale, style and American life has remained constant throughout his influential and extensive career. The artist remarked, "People say painting is real and abstract. Everything in paint that’s representation is false because it’s not representational, it’s paint. We speak different languages and have different syntax. The way I paint, realistic is out of abstract painting as opposed to abstract style. So I use a line, a form and a color. So my contention is that my paintings are as realistic as Rembrandt’s…it was realistic painting in its time. It’s no longer a realistic painting. Realism’s a variable. For an artist, this is the highest thing an artist can do – to make something that’s real for his time, where he lives. But people don’t see it as realistic, they see it as abstract. But for me it’s realistic” (Alex Katz in conversation with David Sylvester, March 1997, online). Rendered in Katz's impossibly cool, reductive style, with its grand scale, bold brushwork and iconic flattened perspective, Yellow House is a superlative example of the artist’s characteristic aesthetic and subject.
