"Katz’s portraits are true to the way we experience others. They eloquently convey the tension between the determinate outer appearance and the indeterminate inner reality of someone known only from the outside… For all their everydayness, Katz’s figures have an air of transient strangeness to them, suggesting the mystery of their inner existence, perhaps even to themselves.”
Rackstraw and Pamela from 1976 exemplifies Alex Katz's extraordinary contribution to the shared visual vocabulary of Contemporary portraiture. Through his highly individualized mode of realism, Katz here fosters a palpable intimacy between the two subjects depicted—Realist painter Rackstraw Downes and his wife at the time, Pamela Berkley. Dually, setting is critical for Katz and the serenity of coastal Maine has proven to be a site of lifelong inspiration for the artist, who has worked and lived there part time since the mid 1950’s; Rackstraw and Pamela specifically recalls the beautiful rocky environs of coastal Maine on a bright, sunny summer day. As Katz achieves in his most successful double portraits, the present painting captures with great specificity the relationship between his two sitters. The artist has noted, “I wanted to use contemporary gestures, contemporary clothes and contemporary people. It was socially all the people I was seeing at the time…I just invited them up and painted them.” Rackstraw and Pamela was formerly in the collection of Charles Saatchi.
Guiding the expansive frame, the two figures in Rackstraw and Pamela—clad in the elegance of summer white New England garb—are seated against a mustard yellow table. A crisp steel sky meets a vast stretch of blue water; punctuated with rocks, the tide meets the dwindling shore. The palpable sense of atmosphere is intensified by the presence of a light summer breeze, which is palpably felt through the wisps of hair that frame their faces. Rackstraw gazes at Pamela, whose eyes are cast downward and whose elbow brushes against her companion’s.
Katz subtly interweaves elements of the natural environment into his portraits, imbuing them with breathtaking liveliness whilst simultaneously capturing idyllic single snapshots of time. He does so without superfluousness, championing flat planes of solid color and using only minimal shadow in his painting. In Rackstraw and Pamela, the presence of shadow in Rackstraw’s face, Pamela’s collarbone and their hands functions to break the realism of the portrait. Katz’ planes of color are thereby abstracting, geometric and communicative of heightened emotion.
Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Katz studied at The Cooper Union and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where he began developing figuration as the primary focus of his artistic oeuvre. The artist emerged from and against the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, forging a quite individualistic creative path. Rackstraw Downes studied with Katz when he taught at Yale University from 1961-63, and like Katz, Downes spent summers working in Maine and the rest of the year in New York City.
From advertisement to film to old master paintings, various artistic influences can be detected in his work. Rackstraw and Pamela specifically possesses the elegant indulgence of an Edouard Manet leisure scene, the illustrative isolation of an Edward Hopper locus and the bright graphics of a David Hockney. Lauded for his stylized portraits of family and friends in everyday yet enigmatic moments, Katz creates artworks that imbue Pop aesthetics with an introspective charge. American art critic Donald Kuspit has reflected on the psychological prowess of Katz' portraits, suggesting: "Katz’s portraits are true to the way we experience others. They eloquently convey the tension between the determinate outer appearance and the indeterminate inner reality of someone known only from the outside… For all their everydayness, Katz’s figures have an air of transient strangeness to them, suggesting the mystery of their inner existence, perhaps even to themselves” (Donald Kuspit, Alex Katz Night Paintings, New York 1991, p. 8)
