Vincent Katz – författare

Friendship, love, and the potential energy of change animate these poems of walking through New York City.Broadway, the famous artery, both off the grid and definitive of Manhattan as it cuts its way downtown, is a metaphor for Katz''s path through these poems: from Lincoln Plaza on the Upper West Side to the African Burial Ground and the courthouses downtown, Katz mines his native city for the deep humanity that undergirds its streets. His title, with its implication that one could give something as large and undefinable as Broadway to a single person, courts an impossibility that generates the possibility of friendship, as well as the largesse Katz wants to find in our civic discourse. In poems such as "Ivanka Skirting" and "This Beautiful Bubble" we encounter his reckoning with a divisive culture that can, he suggests, be healed through our daily acts--through a kind of alert graciousness that also defines his poetry. In this moving collection, we enter Katz''s world, both public and private, and experience poetry as a way of seeing that can change hearts and minds.

Alex Katz has found his audience. It s not the first time. Over seven decades, the artist has developed his vision with determination as the tides of avant-garde and academic fashion ebbed and flowed. His first audience was other painters (including de Kooning and Philip Guston), and today, still, he is perhaps best understood by other artists: those who appreciate how difficult it is to make something so simple, so well. Working in a representational style while his classmates celebrated Abstract Expressionism, eschewing slick surfaces for a pared-down view while his peers went glossy with Pop, Katz cleaved to one vision, a few locations, and subjects. Katz s endurance and commitment to developing an original American style is explored in depth, from his boyhood influences to an artistic circle that included John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Lois Dodd, Kenneth Koch, Frank O Hara, Fairfield Porter, Yvonne Rainer, Larry Rivers, and Paul Taylor. Sketches, works on paper, and archival material selected by the artist s son, the poet Vincent Katz, give a fuller picture of the painter and his world. The more than 250 paintings reproduced at an unprecedented scale will be the most comprehensive collection available in a single publication.