KATZ’S PRIVILEGED, PROVINCIAL NEW YORK EYE

Intermission over, people straggled back to their seats for the second act. An enthusiastic chap turned to the women next to him and chatted about the play. The women stared at him blankly, exchanged glances in silent consultation and replied in polite monosyllables. The man, insulated by a stranger’s innocence, failed to notice that he had just been quietly frozen to death.

His demise had been affected by a laser-like regard of impenetrable impersonality that you find in Manhattan every time you confront a well-dressed native who doesn’t know who you are or what you want. The encounter can be as brief as that little dance we all do in doorways to get safely past one another without--saints forbid--touching. You see the look 50 times a day and after a while it feels like something out of one of those public television programs on wildlife behavior.

“The Homo sapiens subspecies inhabiting the Upper East Side of the island display a distinctive confrontational behavior intended to confuse and intimidate intruders. . . .”

If the painter Alex Katz had never done anything else, he would be worthy of a historical footnote as the artist who captured the Manhattan Fish Eye in oil on canvas in such pictures as “Passing” or “Alex and Ada.”

Katz’s retrospective of nearly 100 paintings, cutouts and collages at the Whitney Museum (to June 15) immortalizes that withering glance and a good deal more. It evokes the essence of a patrician way of life pursued in the great city and its weekend retreats.

Employing a broad brush, light-toned palette, flat poster-like shapes and close cropping, Katz has painted his milieu since the ‘50s. It is a world of clean-shaven men in suits and ties talking to straight-haired women in dresses at artist-loft cocktail parties--except that the paintings are scarcely about a stereotypical artist’s world. When Katz paints himself, he is in a double-breasted pin-stripe and smoking a cigarette or in evening clothes after a formal affair or in a track-jacket while vacationing on the Cape.

Katz’s world is that of the cover of the New Yorker magazine, understated and privileged.

“Style and appearance are the things I’m more concerned about than what something means. I’d like to have style take the place of content. . . . I prefer it to be empty of meaning, empty of content,” says Katz in a catalogue essay noticeably devoid of biographical material.

Well, Katz’s wish is probably sincere, but it is impossible to paint--or live--without meaning, so avoidance becomes a significant theme in itself. Katz appears as a gentleman artist, almost a gifted amateur painting aristocratic Ivy Leaguers who attempt to live according to received conventions, correctly but without undue passion or distressing spontaneity.

The principal bulwark of their style is a kind of classic reticence. In “Thursday Night,” a group of five men are portrayed cropped at mid-chest. They are gathered in Katz’s studio discussing a painting of a woman in a silly green bathing cap. All look like Eastern mainstream stock characters with their muted tailoring, but each in fact bristles with affectation. The handsome chap at the left could be a female poet in drag. The Brooks Brothers sort nearby has pared everything down to remind us that he looks like Clark Kent, no doubt a gentleman jock. Then comes the foreign service officer in the bow tie who is also a collector, thanks to independent means. That slightly scruffy man may be a young critic who compensates for homeliness with dangerous wit.

The combination of simplicity and intense mannerism also typifies Katz’s painting style. In a work like “Roof Garden,” two men sit in a latticed enclosure dappled with light. The gesture of the picture is so flat-out it fleetingly recalls folk art but immediately segues into a kind of pictorial semaphore typical of witty, ingenious graphic design, like that of Gretchen Dow Simpson or Will Barnett. It’s an approach that is finally impossible without an ingrained knowledge of art history moving backwards from Renoir and Manet to the Japanese print and taking in the tensions Katz derived from his early admiration of the New York abstract painters.

So we have highly refined art trying to be casual about its knowledgeability but unable to avoid sprinkling in all manner of arcane references, such as a New York conversation in which everyone tries to act regular while proving that he is very smart indeed. This produces a quality in the work that shades from gentle noblesse oblige to irritating archness.

At one level this is clearly intimist painting, concerned with a small circle of family and friends, and too polite to point out that it includes some distinguished members of New York’s intellectual and artistic sphere, referring to them just as “Rudy” or “Edwin.” Coy again.

Katz paints his handsome wife Ada over and again. Pictures such as “Blue Umbrella” seep with affection, which is neutralized by a variety of tactics. Her scarf is painted with as much emphasis as her face. She is treated with gentle wryness, her figure repeated four times in the same dress. God forbid this art should be caught in a sentimental mood.

It swivel-hips around intimate feelings by using big, aggressive, billboard scale and flat, strident colors, without ever quite hiding Katz’s real empathy--his saving grace. It was a mistake to bracket Katz with the Pop artists in the ‘60s but it was an intelligent error. The art sets up an endless series of visual oxymorons that contradict modest compassion with ambitious sarcasm. In his cutouts and serial paintings, such as “Pas de Deux,” he approaches satire. Oh, but we mustn’t make fun of our friends. Bad form. Traitor to one’s class.

At about every third work, you are ready to throw in the towel on this art and its arrogant ambiguities. Then Katz paints a moose or a dog, admitting how charming the animals are and how embarrassing their naturalness is to a city dweller. Then he buys further indulgence with a lyric masterpiece, such as “Good Afternoon.” All the pretentious twaddle falls away as a woman in a canoe glides silently toward us across lime green water.

Everything characteristic of the painting is also everything characteristic of the world it records. Katz’s art is like the work of a preppie Alan Alda character, a kind of conservative liberal full of noble intentions and human foibles who honestly doesn’t know how he feels and is afraid to find out. Our feeling about the work becomes inseparable from our feelings about the kinds of people it portrays. It becomes oddly political both in the life it depicts and in the way an important museum offers it to us as significant work. When was the last time we saw contemporary art so utterly devoid of qualities of radicalism or rebellion? The art appreciated by the ‘80s is getting very well-bred and amiable indeed.

In a way, Alex Katz’ work fulfills one of the most basic requirements of art: It makes an honest record of a milieu even as Manet or Toulouse-Lautrec captured Parisian demi-mondes and it evokes New York novelists even as they paralleled Zola. Katz’s art may be excessively conventional in that it brings little new insight to a culture we already know in depth. Katz could wind up as a high-level society painter like Guy Pene du Bois.

But that is not the most interesting thing about this art’s coming to museum-retrospective prominence at this time. Katz’s art does not stand alone; it speaks about the emergence and continuation of a long-ignored tradition. We heard nothing of it when Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalist styles were everywhere influential. They made New York art appear nothing but international in scope.

Since the passing of such styles we have seen the reassertion of artists such as Milton Avery, Fairfield Porter, Katz and--continuing the sensibility into the present--Jennifer Bartlett.

They share a common profile that bears on a recent problem facing New York art. The Post-Modernist sensibility says there is to be a resurgence of art rooted to particular locales, a new regionalism. This would appear to present a problem for the virtually universal sensibility broadcast for four decades out of Manhattan.

Well, artists like Alex Katz, grounded in the local landscape and social mores, make an art that cannot be elsewhere duplicated, proving, by gum, that as we had long suspected, Gotham can be as provincial as the next guy.