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When Alex Katz paints one of his large, signature paintings, it is an act of the utmost concentration, a performance in which he draws on years of experience as well as on preliminary sketches, painted studies, finished drawings, and a large charcoal cartoon, transferring the bare bones of the image to his canvas. Then he is set to paint, and he usually finishes his paintings in one day. In this case, he painted the six-by-fourteen foot January III in five hours, as his son, Vincent Katz, and daughter-in-law, Vivien Bittencourt, videotaped him.
This painting furnishes an ideal example of Katz's technique because we get to witness, in separate panels of a triptych framework, spontaneous passages of tree branches and the controlled modeling of a large face of his wife, Ada, the subject of many of Katz's paintings.
We get to see the artist's famous portrait style, as well as the landscape style for which Katz has recently been acclaimed. The videomakers decided against the use of dialogue; the painter is accompanied only by the music of composer and theater artist Meredith Monk. This video captures the essence of Katz, that quality Robert Storr of the Museum of Modern Art defines as the unquantifiable “cool”, in a dazzling and moving display of commitment to the experience of painting.
Al Maysles (director of Gimme Shelter) says: “This video stands out in such great contrast to what's wrong with most contemporary film and television, where the motion on the screen and the camera movements are like a salt shaker shaking salt on to a plate. In Alex Katz Five Hours, there's meat and potatoes; with the others, there's nothing on the plate.”
| Catalog Number: MC-859 |
Type: Short |
Genre: Art / Artist |
| Copyright: 1996 |
Length: 20 minutes |
Format:
DVD Region: 0 |
| TV System: NTSC |
ISBN: |
UPC/EAN: 880198085993 |
| Label: Checkerboard Film Foundation |
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Wholesale Purchasing:
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Exhibition:
Microcinema is not authorized to represent this title for exhibition. Write us for this contact information.
Films In Compilation
Alex Katz Five Hours directed by
Vincent
Katz
USA,
Art / Artist,
1996,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:20:00
Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York. In 1928 the family moved to St.Albans, Queens. From 1946 to 1949 he studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. His first one-person show came in 1954: an exhibition of paintings at the Roko Gallery in New York. In 1974 The Whitney Museum of American Art showed Alex Katz Prints, followed by a traveling retrospective exhibition Alex Katz in 1986. During his first ten years as a painter, Katz admitted to destroying a thousand paintings. Since the 1950s, he grew as an artist and tried to create works more freely in the sense that he tried to paint faster than [he] can think. His works seem simple, but according to Katz they are more reductive, which is fitting to his personality.
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2010-05-10 Educational Media Reviews Online
By Sebastian Derry
Painter, sculptor, and printmaker Alex Katz was filmed in 1992 in his studio in New York, creating January III, a large triptych (6ft by 14ft) oil on canvas. The painting took five hours to create, and the entire creation was distilled down to 20 minutes for this DVD.
No dialogue, no voice-over, no narration, no fancy camera work, just pure process as we see Katz first outline the painting in charcoal, then the adding of details and the layering of paint, and on through to the final finishing touches.
What does it take to create a painting? A lot of effort, and we have it here firsthand. It’s an engrossing and compelling document of the artist at work.
| 2010-04-28 bigthink.com
It’s usually a tie between watching paint dry and watching grass grow for the title of most boring thing to do ever. Watching the paint dry and, more importantly, flow in Alex Katz: Five Hours, however, may be the most fascinating thing you’ll find yourself watching. Renowned American portraitist Alex Katz allowed himself to be filmed in 1992 painting January III, a triptych featuring a portrait of his wife Ada flanked by a wintry forest, from beginning to end over the course of five hours. Boiled down to 20 minutes, those five hours seem like an eternity—in a good way.
Katz allowed his son, Vincent Katz, and daughter-in-law, Vivien Bittencourt, to film him painting in his studio. Perhaps only a blood relationship could coax the artist to work on the record. Many artists famously refuse to be filmed in the act of creation. Andrew Wyeth infamously refused to be filmed or even photographed with pencil or brush in hand. Like magicians loath to reveal trade secrets, painters hate to have eyes peeking at unfinished work. Yet, without such documentation, we’d never know the process by which these masterpieces are made.
Even more fascinating than the physical details revealed by Alex Katz: Five Hours are the intellectual details. You can almost hear the wheels spinning in Katz’s head as he turns from the canvas back towards preliminary drawings and painted sketches on the walls and even on the floor of his studio. Katz follows and disregards these guides by turns, sometimes following earlier decisions and sometimes making new ones on the spot. The music of Meredith Monk provides not only a soundtrack to the film, but also a soundtrack to the artist’s mind—pulsing and whirling about even when he seems at his most still.
Although Alex Katz: Five Hours made its debut in 1996, this DVD release comes at the perfect time as a harbinger of the great things expected from the Katz exhibition opening in May 2010 at the National Gallery of Art in London. Katz remains a true American original who has perfected a cool style of portraiture as well as an almost Asian, Zen-like style of landscape, both of which appear in January III. The deceptive simplicity of his portraits masks the meticulous modeling of their features and the laser-like focus on the essentials of the individual’s being. Sadly, mainstream success on American soil continues to elude Katz, who at 83 is just now finding full acceptance as a major American painter of the second half of the twentieth century. If you know nothing of Katz’s work, you should—he’ll be a standard name in the art history texts you’re children and grandchildren will be reading. If you know Katz and want to know more, watch some paint dry and witness a brilliant creative mind at work.
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