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This item WAS NOT SOLD. Auction date was 2003 May 15 @ 19:00UTC-05:00 : EST/CDT
ALEX KATZ
(b. 1927)
THE RED BAND
oil on canvas
72 x 144 in. (183 x 365.8 cm)
painted in 1975
ESTIMATE: $250,000-350,000
PROVENANCE
Marlborough Gallery, NEW YORK
Paul J. Schupf
EXHIBITED
NEW YORK, Marlborough Gallery, ALEX KATZ, March 1-29, 1980, p. 17, no. 16 (illustrated)
WATERVILLE, MAINE, Colby College Museum of Art, ALEX KATZ: AN EXHIBITION FEATURING WORKS FROM THE COLLECTION OF PAUL J. SCHUPF, July 10-October 6, 1985, no. 11
"Wryly, nonchalantly, The Red Band transposes into modern dres, modern manners, the enigma of Rodin's Thinker, even of Michelangelo's Lorenzo de' Medici. Contemplating the painting, we wonder what this woman wonders.
Somewhere in its complex (if seeming simple) structure, the picture encompasses the issue of solipsism, and of the relationship between self-regard and engagement with an 'other.' This is addressed most obviously in the repetition of the figure, the fact that she is shown literally keeping her own company, her own council. It is addressed in the way that each version of the figure is a rotation of the other; if the table were turned like a carousel, the left-hand figure would swing in the same pose and position as the right-hand figure, and vice versa. Given this, the irony of the single, revealed eye is that though it has been turned towards us, it is in turn turned away. It as a cut-out, which by its nature plays more explicity with the possibility of reversing the composition, revolving it like a weather vane, but only to show us a verso in which neither face faces us.
This woman is self-sufficient, even self-centered; it is others - us - whom she puts in a spin, to whom she gives the runaround. She always hides part of herself. So vain, perhaps, she leaves us vainly trying to encompass her, enter her sphere. As so often in Katz, selfhood, personal space, private domain, is symbolized by structures of physical shelter or concentric enclosure - here by the implied sun umbrella and the wide-brimmed hat. The operation of this kind of symbolism is subliminal, it remains latent in the painter's liking for spheres, cones and ellipses throughout his work, recurring in hats, glasses, the radiating or centripetal forms of trees and flowers, the wrap-arounds of collars and coats, the enclosure of hoods, scarves and hairdos. In the present picture, ovals and ellipses are ubiquitous in cuffs, buttons, the round table. The red hat band itself, picked out in the title as the identifying feature, encapsulates and circumscribes identity. It is, perhaps, less the garland or ribbon that in folk tradition was worn to mark faithful betrothal, than a token of independence and demure self-possession. The single eye, so often isolated in Katz's paintings (its concentric circles inscribed with infinite variety), implies the 'I' of individuality.
The eye, the banded hat, the circular table, the sunshade, the sunlight itself, all operate in the picture as an extended, even tenuous, metaphor for qualities and processes pertaining to the subject, the woman depicted. Katz's figuration could even be read as consisting of 'figures' in the sense of the figures of speech and though in a seventeenth-century metaphysical poem. How, though, can such a metaphoric dimensions be said to inhere in the work more particularly than they would in any rendition of an eye, any composition containing ellipses or concentric structures? Certainly it is not the artist's 'intentions' that have to be appealed to in defense of such a claim, but rather the internal logic of the painting, read in the context of other related images available to the viewer. The factors operating in the picture's assumption of meaning are many and complex. Certain devices such as the singling-out of an eye or the duplication of a figure are conspicuous, but other levels at which the picture operates are less tangible. There is the way it sets up cumulative references and resonances with other works in the artist's oeuvre - other repeat portraits, compartmentalized compositions, pivotal eyes, color-space grounds and so forth. Beyond this, the work asks to be read in relation to a whole tradition within visual culture of images of the enigmatic female, of which Leonardo's Giocaonda is the paradigm, and Hollywood's femme fatale the popular manifestation. It is not necessarily a question here of active allusion but of Katz distinguishing himself among his predecessors and peers in all aspects of his image-making performance. In order for the painting to sustain substantive and ambitious meanings, part of what is required is simply that it hold our attention long and strongly enough as a composition of form and colour, a surface, an illusion, an orchestration of depicted 'items', to induce us to reflect upon the fuller significance that is indeed potential in any rendition of an eye, a gesture, a sunshade."
M. James, ALEX KATZ: TWENTY FIVE YEARS OF PAINTING, LONDON, 1997, pp. 43-44
Auction Location:
United States
Previewing Details:
Saturday May 3, 2003 10am to 5pm, Sunday May 4, 2003 1pm to 5pm, Monday May 5, 2003 10am to 5pm, Tuesday May 6, 2003 10am to 5pm, Wednesday May 7, 2003 10am to 5pm, Thursday May 8, 2003 10am to 5pm, Friday May 9, 2003 10am to 5pm, Saturday May 10, 2003 10am to 5pm, Sunday May 11, 2003 1pm to 5pm, Monday May 12, 2003 10am to 5pm, Tuesday May 13, 2003 10am to 5pm, Wednesday May 14, 2003 10am to 5pm, Thursday May 15, 2003 10am to 2pm
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