Word: katze
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...single line-up change for Harvard is at coxswain, where Marty Katz will replace Ogan Gurel. Sophomore Tom Patterson remains at stroke, and is backed by Kevin Bedell at seven, Larry Meyer at six, Jim Himes at five, Dave Berger at four, Wendland at three, Captain Trip Switzer at two, and Duncan Robbins in the bow seat...
Which heaven forfend! The stylishness and power of impact of Katz's work are not in doubt. Over the years he has come up with a way of doing quite a lot with limited plastic means. His sources are largely those of Pop art: the quickly seen, iconic, coercive imagery of mass media, which he then modifies and softens with high-art references. His main subject is the human face, close up and cropped by the frame, a pearly or tanned mask of flat paint with schematic shading, great swacking eyelashes and lipstick-colored lips: it is the face...
Granted the zippy registration of Katz's style and his constant ingenuity at fitting stacks of faces into difficult and mannered formats, given his bonhomie and sense of the social moment, the freshness of his color and the adroitness with which he makes his art-historical references--all this admitted, why does this show produce so unmistakable an aftertaste of satiation and deja vu? Katz's fans like to stress that his paintings are "deceptively simple," as though some mass of knotted thought lurked beneath their surfaces. But in fact, what you see is what you get, and his repertoire...
...problem is not, as one sometimes hears, that Katz "paints the same thing over and over": everyone has his list of great artists who have done that, from Cezanne laboring at Montagne Ste.-Victoire to Morandi with his dusty bottles. It is that Katz is a poor draftsman. He seems not to look at anything but the painting, and so repeats the same stereotypes for the human face and body, for houses and dogs, steering wheels and tables, and everything else that he puts in his big, clean, post-Hopperish spaces. The idea of drawing as scrutiny of a subject...
This show fails to suggest that Katz was ever interested in anything beyond the most generalized form of his human subjects. He may draw figures better than Milton Avery, but that is not saying much. The late-'50s portraits of Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Taylor and Norman Bluhm are, as portraiture, thin and perfunctory; for a quick check on what a first-rate American draftsman could do with the human face as a focus of inquisitorial attention, one could have done worse than visit West 57th Street after leaving the Whitney to catch the show of Ellsworth Kelly's portrait drawings...