Old Friends: David Salle and Alex Katz

Most if not all art reaches backward to earlier models in some way; every rupture is also a continuity. The “reaching back” might be to unexpected sources, but imprints of earlier achievements are what give art its gristle and grit. What’s different is the mode of seeing.

— David Salle

When you’re working with the tradition of art, you’re usually painting like the paintings you’ve seen; your vision is other people’s vision. You see things through the culture in which you live. and the culture in which you live is always past tense. Some people are always seeing things in another time period.To see things in the present time period, you have to break through, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do.

— Alex Katz 

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David Salle (b.1952) and Alex Katz (b.1927)  have been friends for more than forty years. Katz has painted Salle, Salle has written about Katz. They were both friends and admirers of poet and art critic, Frank O’Hara. Both Katz and Salle  have collaborated with poets, dancers and choreographers. Both have lived in New York, although Katz was born, bred and still lives in the city and Salle moved to the city in in the 1970s and currently lives and works in East Hampton, New York. 

 

They each developed their own unique styles, and were often criticized for their non-conformist approach to art. 

 

 

Salle juxtaposes seemingly unrelated images on his canvasses, often using his own photographs as basic design for his works. He has recently been working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate images that reflect his style.

 

Salle was at the opening of Katz’s retrospective at the Guggenheim last year. He described the scene in an article in ARTFORUM: “In late October,” he wrote, “on the opening night of the Alex Katz retrospective at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, crowds of people in a party mood lined the spiral ramp from the ground-floor rotunda all the way to the uppermost skylight. This in itself is not so unusual—just about any opening at a major New York museum tends to bring out the scenesters. What happened next, however, is less common. Toward the end of the night, as the artist, who at ninety-five is seemingly immune to the depredations of advanced age, and who that evening was resplendent in a cream-colored suit and gold tie, made his way across the packed rotunda to the revolving doors, the entire museum erupted in an ovation that continued even after Katz reached a waiting car. I’ve never witnessed anything like it. Sure, I’ve seen plenty of choreographed applause orgies at seated dinners after speeches or other ritualistic gestures, but never anything quite like this purely spontaneous outpouring of appreciation—of love, really. Has there ever been a retrospective in our city so long awaited and so richly deserved?”

 

Both Katz and Salle’s works are part of the permanent collections of MoMA, the Met, the Guggenheim and other major museums.

 

David Salle’s work is currently on exhibit at the Edward Hopper House Museum in Nyack, New York. David Salle: Works on Paper includes figurative works that Salle completed in 2023. The exhibit runs through April 28, 2024.

 

An upcoming solo exhibit: Alex Katz: Claire, Grass and Water will open on April 16, 2024 at Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice and run through September 29, 2024.

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February 15, 2024