Swamp Maple (4:30)

1968

Alex Katz

Artist, American, born 1927

A single, slender tree vertically bisects a landscape painted in tones of cool yellow, green, and gray in this tall, stylized painting. The tree trunk is nickel gray and mostly straight until it branches into smaller limbs about two-thirds of the way up the composition. A few short branches with bright, celery- and sage-green leaves poke out of the main trunk but most of the foliage is above, where three-pointed, dark laurel-green and spruce-blue leaves line spindly branches in the top third. A harvest-toned, flax-yellow expanse fills the bottom third of the composition, suggesting a grassy field. A block of frosty mint-green beyond reads as a body of water. Charcoal-gray cliffs about halfway up the painting along the right edge reflect as white in the green pool, and pale-gray hills line the rest of the horizon. A narrow band of pale blue over the hills gives way abruptly to a flat, butter-yellow sky.

Media Options

This object’s media is not available for download. Contact us about image usage.

Although best known for his figure paintings, often set in and around Manhattan, Alex Katz is equally a painter of Maine, where he has summered for decades. Swamp Maple (4:30) is one of his largest landscapes in every sense—at once monumental and unstable, fast and slow, flat and deep, hard and soft, general and particular, observed and abstract.

Katz captured the glow of weak sun on leaf and water and the contrasting textures of soft grass and rough bark (nicely conveyed by drying cracks, which the artist left intentionally rather than painting over them). The color choices, such as the tan sky and the white reflection of the black shore, are memorable and puzzling. The time of day, as indicated in the title, is 4:30 (in the afternoon), but perhaps the precise time is not so important, given Katz' stated goals of capturing an "overall light" in "the present tense." Temporality is complicated by process: Katz makes rapid oil-on-masonite sketches outdoors, then returns to the studio for laborious work.

Where are we? The absence of a viewpoint or standpoint is aided by radical cropping, a Katz trademark: "A lot of these paintings don't have much of a floor," he remarks slyly, and indeed the handling of the grass suggests a plane slipping away. Space is deepened by aerial perspective (the pale blue hills), then drained by the color of the sky, which sits on the surface. The tree is not in the landscape so much as in front of it, a strangely central repoussoir, perhaps even a stand-in for the artist or the beholder who stretches out his or her limbs to the limits of the scene, alive to every breeze. Is the artist a cool observer or a passionate identifier? The question has a distinguished tradition: it can be equally asked of Paul Cézanne and his beloved pine trees, or Gustave Courbet and his oak.

Katz steered his own course throughout the 1960s, paying close attention to artists as diverse as Barnett Newman, James Rosenquist, Fairfield Porter, and Al Held, who had a neighboring studio in New York for much of that decade. Swamp Maple (4:30) rivals the scale of abstract expressionism, borrows the language of hard-edge abstraction, and steers a course between the softness of plein-air painting and the slickness of pop art.

On View

NGA, East Building, EU-405, STAIRWELL


Artwork overview

More About this Artwork

Article:  Portraits of Trees, a Favorite Subject of Artists

Many artists have painted, photographed, and drawn nature’s magnificent sculptures.


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

The artist; purchased June 2008 (through PaceWildenstein, New York) by NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1969

  • Alex Katz at Cheat Lake, Mont Chateau Lodge, West Virginia University, Morgantown, 1969, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

1971

  • Alex Katz, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City; The Art Gallery, University of California, San Diego; Minnesota Museum of Art, St. Paul; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, 1971, no. 39, repro.

1986

  • Alex Katz, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, 1986, pl. 54.

1997

  • Alex Katz: Under the Stars: Landscapes 1951-1995, Institute for Contemporary Art / P.S. 1 Museum, Long Island City, 1997-1998, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

2002

  • Alex Katz: In Your Face, Kunst-und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, 2002, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

2006

  • Alex Katz: The Sixties, PaceWildenstein, New York, 2006, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

2015

  • Alex Katz, This is Now, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2015, pl. 9.

Bibliography

2008

  • Cooper, Harry. "Alex Katz, Swamp Maple." National Gallery of Art Bulletin no. 39 (Fall 2008): 20-21, repro.

Wikidata ID

Q20196938


You may be interested in

Loading Results