On its face, the premise of “Alex Katz: Theater and Dance” sounds unpromising. The stiffness of the artist’s painted figures is a key component of his style and has been since he arrived upon it seven decades ago. (He is in his mid-nineties and still painting.) How might he handle dance, of all things?
The answer depends on whether you accept the validity of Katz’s creative project. If so, then you agree that Katz has kept the Color Field movement alive all these years in his outsize canvases and their single-hue backgrounds. The flattening of the figures arises from a formal need to integrate them with the grounds. Cropping them oddly, as Katz often does, pushes that integration further. It stops the surrounding color from operating as space or atmosphere and prevents it from having any identity except that of a wall of paint, true to the Color Field ethos. His willingness to admit fashion into his work, as well as the stylish people sporting it, transformed the tendency of Pop Art to wallow in vulgarity into something less cynical and more friendly and affirming. You accept the assertion of the renowned curator Robert Storr, who contributed a short essay to the “Theater and Dance” catalogue and consulted on the show’s installation, that Katz is “paying close attention to how things look, knowing, as he does, that rather than being superficial, appearances are the key to understanding who and what we are.”