Embrace The Winter Blues
(And yellows and greens.) On Alex Katz, Mrs. Prada, dainty floral dishware, and more.
I recently drove up to see Colby College’s Art Museum. The campus and museum are in the town of Waterville, which is nestled along the Kennebec river; it’s about an hour and a half drive from my place and equidistant from China and Rome—not the countries but the Maine towns, Maine being more prone to naming places after other places than anywhere else I’ve ever been: the village of Egypt, the towns of Norway, Paris, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Leeds.
The day trip was, like many adventures, Dan’s idea. I’d been whining about the monotony of winter, missing New York, feeling burnt out, etcetera, and he suggested a Sunday of art and skiing, Colby being right next door to a cheap and beautifully maintained cross country trail system.
One of the things that had been making me miss New York was, unfortunately, Instagram. And specifically the phenomenon of watching the same art show—Alex Katz: Gathering at the Guggenheim—pop up again and again (and again and again) on the social media feeds of friends and acquaintances and random semi-famous personalities I follow. I wanted to spiral my way among the huge colorful canvases, I wanted to post my own photo of the yellow Sally Rooney cover. So it was with some delight that, tooling around on the Colby museum site the evening before we went up, I was reminded that the Katz show was a collaborative project between the Guggenheim and Colby, Colby’s exhibition being Theater and Dance, the vast, first-ever survey of the painter’s relationship to those performing arts.
The hugeness of the work is what gets you first, or at least what got me. But also the dual sense of movement and stillness, which I think is helped along by the flattening of tones in the paintings.
The Colby museum has more than 900 pieces of Katz’s work; after his graduation from Cooper Union he attended Maine’s Skowhegan School over the summer of 1949, where he was introduced to painting en plein air—and also to the flat bright light of the Maine coast. I’m not a painter nor art historian, not an expert in any way, but I’ve always found interesting the light of a place, and how that light finds its way into art. Alex Katz’s paintings seem influenced by the same flat light that worked its way into Winslow Homer’s paintings, or later David Driskell’s—so different from the warm wash of Northern California painters or the diffuse glow the Hudson Valley school found in the Catskills and searched for wherever they went.
The Guggenheim filmed an interview with Katz at his studio in Maine. “Most landscape paintings are done with a very generalized light because they do it a piece at a time, and I’m trying to get into where the jazz musicians are: the immediate present.” That sense of a captured moment, the necessary peeling away of extraneous details in order to service that immediacy, seems present in his portraiture as well.
The other thing with Katz, obviously, is the color. The great swathes of cadmium and canary yellow and teal. It’s hard to look at colors like these—especially when they are wall-size, when the faces are double or triple the height of an actual human face—without feeling. Overwhelmed. Joyful. On the verge of tears.
I had just seen the Katz exhibition, was walking around with all that color swimming in my brain, when the Prada F/W 23 show went up online.
Like a lot of women (and especially those who, however mournfully, see themselves as more intelligent than beautiful on that particular binary scale), I have a thing with Prada. Miuccia Prada, the woman who built the brand, has always made smart clothes. (I also interviewed her the day after I got engaged, and the conversation, and its resulting Vanity Fair profile, will always hold a very special place in my heart.) From Yale’s Prada Catwalk:
“If you choose to wear Prada,” wrote Iain R Webb in the Guardian’s European collections report for Autumn/Winter 1991-1992, “you think of anything but clothes: Proust, the meaning of life, or just what did that granite obelisk symbolise in 2001: A Space Odyssey?” Of course, this is a joke—and a good one at that—but it was at around this point that Prada’s work became identified as “intellectual.”
The whimsy! The shapes! The color (largely attributed to hue king Raf Simmons, who joined Prada as co-creative director in 2020)! Positively Katzian. It’s all enough to make this drab neutral-lover yearn for pale pinks, bright yellows, sky blues—at least a pop, the Prada way, these happy blocks of color peeking out of a wardrobe otherwise awash in grey and brown and tan. (Or Katz himself, in his pink bucket hat.) Totally delightful.
READ the books recommended in the most recent Anything Good column, and Kyle Chayka’s recent newsletter on the loss of control over our cultural collections, and also this nutty, wonderful conversation I had with Margaret Atwood.
BUY floral dish ware that will tide you over until spring (just twelve days away!).
EAT fried polenta—soft and melty inside, crispy deliciousness outside. I had some at Portland’s Central Provisions recently and have not stopped thinking about it.
That’s all for now! Thanks, as ever, for being here. If you enjoyed this, tap the heart or share with a friend or, my favorite, let me know what’s adding color to your world right now—a book, a movie, a great pair of socks. Til next time!
xx KW