The Seasons, as Seen by Alex Katz

Onlookers stand to shift their chairs before sitting down once more, now facing a new wall. Sound echoes off the high ceilings of the MoMA’s atrium, but the visitors continue to turn their chairs in utmost serenity, like sunflowers swiveling to trace the path of the sun. Alex Katz’s installation, titled Seasons, has created a tangible bubble of serenity around the exhibit that, incredibly, is composed of merely four works of art. Despite the exhibit’s small scale, every work challenges the viewers’ perception of nature. Each piece has a specific mood that can be identified by anyone who has shivered through February or clung to summer through September. The exhibit opened on July 4—a fittingly patriotic date for an artist who has been shaping American art for seven decades. Katz takes common seasonal occurrences and compares their beauty and relevance side by side. 

Katz, a Brooklyn native, has been making art since the 1950s. His works range from saturated wildlife paintings to portraits with reduced features and frosty gazes. For the majority of his career, Katz has been identified through his undetailed, large-scale portraits, usually depicting women. He typically derived inspiration from a variety of landscapes including rural coastal Maine and his urban SoHo neighborhood. 

The exhibition space is a vast atrium that contains three walls and a balcony overlooking the museum’s lower floor and outdoor area. Each season is embodied by a different angle of trees on a large canvas. As per Katz’s usual style, the foliage is painted on a stark background without a setting or horizon. The exhibit’s description identifies this choice as an aid to Katz’s pursuit of visual sensations around color and seeing. His style is best described as naked, not in the sense that it is lacking substance, but as if the bareness gives the impression that his subjects are depicted in their purest state without distractions.

On the closest wall to the entrance sits Winter Tree 1 (2023), where a gaunt tree sits dark on a bright white background. The tree shoots straight up, and skeletal branches reach towards the borders. Some of the branches appear suspended in midair, completely disconnected from the tree’s trunk. Stray dribbles of oil paint drip down the canvas like tears from Katz’s brash and wide brush strokes. This tree is barren, but it appears to be reaching out to the viewer—as if to engulf them with its achromic, bitter limbs. 

The largest painting in the exhibit, Spring (2023), sits boldly on the gallery’s center wall. The gigantic canvas is evenly sectioned vertically into four areas, like panels depicting different angles of the same tree’s umbrage side by side. The color of the dark branches is consistent with the boughs of Winter Tree 1, but they are adorned with large, sky-blue abstract splotches. The foliage is sprinkled with flecks of greens and pinks, giving the impression of fresh blossoms. Katz’s Spring gives the impression of kaleidoscopic movement and growth, like the stereotypically carefree nature of the season. The brush strokes are not measured, but they’re more deliberate in their placement than in Winter Tree 1’s drippy, static lines. Looking between the two starkly different images, the revelation that both states are naturally conceived mere weeks apart feels jarring.  

On the last wall, two portraits remain. The vibrant canvas of Summer 21 (2023) is dominated by a dark forest green. Specks of bright yellow-green litter the canvas and collect in the center, while a handful of dark stripes reach towards the exterior of the picture—a dense treetop illuminated by sunlight from the side. The painting feels like the cool shade provided by the tree. 

Summer 21’s full green is starkly contrasted by the bright orange of Autumn 5 (2022). Two nearly symmetrical tree trunks spring from the bottom of the canvas and then turn away from each other on the way to the top. Both thin bodies yield even thinner off-shooting branches. A spectrum of red to orange leaves shaped like teardrops angle to the bottom corners of the painting, beautifully evoking real movement as if the leaves spiral from side to side until they softly hit the ground. The orange peel of the background bleeds through to the foreground like golden October light filtering through the unattached leaves. 

The position of this exhibit in the atrium reflects the themes depicted in Katz’s work; museum visitors moving from room to room are mirrored by the shifting seasons on the walls they pass. The atrium not only provides a beautiful space to hang the artwork, but it also is the only place in the museum that could do it justice through movement. The moveable chairs strewn around the room give guests the opportunity to rest for a moment and enjoy the art from any angle.

Katz has the incredible ability to convey his message without the use of pixelated detail or measured technique. But his simplified style should never be underestimated as a lack of artistic capacity; his artwork is meaningful, and the message he conveys is not bound by the simplicity of paint on his canvas. 

Katz has been known to wrangle the vague entities of “eternity” and “movement” throughout his career, which this showcase represents by focusing on changing seasons. It seems that Katz’s purpose behind this exhibit is to celebrate the wonder and beauty that is too often overlooked because of their repetition. The unfixed chairs sitting in the center of the room allow viewers the serenity to change, like seasons, as they admire Katz’s undiluted work.