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Page 28-29, Alex Katz, Harbour # 3, oil on canvas, 1999. Alex Katz, Nine A.M, oil on canvas, 1999.
Photo: Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images Photo: Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images
(by SIAE 2020) (by SIAE 2020)

can be captured only there and nowhere else. “I love the light of Evening’s velvet darkness softening faces and
these places,” the artist recounts, “my studio faces south and, in voices calling from the garden,
a certain sense, the sun revolves around it. It’s a pleasant, harmo- blue moon pulling double duty this month
nious place.” everything stopped spinning and the stars spoke
as clear a language as they speak to sailors
The light and the sea. Like in Sea. Land. Sky, a painting from in the wide ocean night;
1959, or in Harbour #3, from 1999. The canvas encapsulates the “sooner or later, one of us must know.”
pathway of every seafarer. There is what you leave behind, what you
return to, and the sky that always accompanies you on your journey. Marine 1-10, a collaboration between Max Blagg and Alex Katz.
In 2008, the Jablonka Galerie in Cologne exhibited a series
of ten paintings he made of beaches in Maine, the so-called Ma- The sea has always been a part of his history and his life.
rine Series. Katz said he was “amazed by the constantly changing When he is on the Maine coast, the Atlantic Ocean is before
colors of the ocean.” For the exhibit’s catalogue, the English poet his eyes. Over 3,200 sea miles away lies Europe. His gaze looks
Max Blagg translated his amazement (regarding painting num- back on the path taken by his parents, Russian emigrants fleeing
ber 2) into verse: the Revolution, in search of a future in the New World.

30 Art Protagonist