…or should that be, a Marine for the CUE?
Next Wednesday the CUE Art Foundation honors art historian Irving Sandler and painter Alex Katz “for their extraordinary career achievements and for their support and championing of visual artists.” The CUE, now in its eighth year, is principally known as a venue for paired exhibitions of under-recognized, often mid-career artists selected by curators who are themselves selected by an advisory board. Curators tend to be artists, poets or scholars rather than career curators or art historians. An exception to these rules was the most recent exhibition, organized by Robert Storr and Sandler, titled “That is Then, This is Now,” a group show of artists whose work from the 1980s was paired with recent output.
Sandler and Katz go back a long way. Sandler was secretary of the short-lived cooperative, the Tanager, of which Katz was a member. Throughout their careers, Sandler has been chronicling Katz’s work as Katz has, more erratically, Sandler’s visage, including recently a triple portrait that also featured Storr. Sandler authored, and then substantially revised, Katz’s monograph from Abrams. It was with Katz, Alfred Leslie and Philip Pearlstein in mind that Sandler coined the phrase, “New Perceptual Realism.”
Irving recalls the conversations that lead to his 1966 portrait as a US marine. He challenged Katz on the fact that his portraits always depicted friends in passive, quotidian mode rather than in a “moment of glory.” Alex wondered what such a moment would entail and military prowess came up. A while later Sandler was summoned to the studio and presented with a marine’s uniform which at first he flatly refused to wear as it was the detail of an enlisted man whereas Sandler had been an officer, a qualm he seems to have overcome. Some years earlier, however, in contradiction to Sandler’s critique, Katz had already depicted friends in uniform, with Frank O’Hara and Bill Berkson as, respectively, a marine and a sailor, flanking and obliviously gazing through a Joan Holloway-like redhead in a pink dress, in Rockaway, 1961. DAVID COHEN
click here for more details on the benefit.
Alex Katz, The Marine, 1966. Oil on Linen, 48 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the Artist.
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