Audio recording

Instantly simplistic, Alex Katz’s Homage to Monet 3 invokes the historical significance of Claude Monet’s Water Lily paintings, the most widely known and venerated body of work by the French Impressionist. In this 2009 painting, pale yellow lily pads sprinkle across the top left corner of the inky water, and the picture plane is balanced by a jagged shadowed line of unseen flora across the bottom. His imaginative and striking approach to every medium made him one of the best-known artists of the Surrealist movement and iconic artists of the twentieth century.

Katz, who numbers among the most important exponents of American Contemporary Art, is known for his large-scale paintings featuring broad brush strokes, sharp edges, and vivid colors. Although he is based in New York, many of Katz’s paintings find inspiration in the surrounding landscape of his summer home and studio in Maine. For over 50 years, Katz resisted painting his nearby water lily pond, having difficulty finding his own aesthetic in comparison to Monet’s expertly captivating water lilies. He began to tackle the content later in his career between 2009 to 2010, stating that the natural light of Maine appeared richer and darker than that of Impressionist paintings, which helped Katz separate himself from the history of European painting and find his own eyes. The series, Homage to Monet, was exhibited in 2019 at the Musée de l’Orangerie, where Katz first encountered Claude Monet’s Water Lily series in 1965.

The bright yellow shapes of Katz’s lily pads compliment the hard lines of cut-glass shapes placed against starkly contrasting colors in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Color and Light located to the left of Homage to Monet 3. Blocks of strong color divided by exacting lines in both works create a communion of hard-edged abstraction. Greeted first by a field of soft violet with a precisely cut mirror in the center, each additional panel of Color and Light features a new shape against a uniquely, saturated color: yellow, cobalt, pink, sky blue, green, and orange reveal a unique part of the puzzle. Fully interlocking, the final panel reveals a complete mirrored puzzle in its entirety, as well as the full figure of the viewer. Pistoletto regularly invites the viewer into his mirrored works, often including figures of himself or others silkscreened onto the reflective surfaces, a reference to the theatricality of viewer and object relationship in a white box gallery. With each personal interaction between the viewer and the mirrors, Pistoletto sees a unique work existing in that moment. In describing his Color and Light series, the artist states, “… it’s not only the gesture of the break and the figure that it creates in the mirror. The shape of this figure produces many individual mirrors… They could be in the game of society, where every person is a piece of the mirror, just as every person is a piece of society. Society is like a big mirror.”