About Faces

“Amiably peopled” is how I would describe Gathering, the show of Alex Katz’s work at the Guggenheim. His paintings, mostly of fellow artists and writers, crowd the rotunda, producing a layered and incongruous dance with the Saturday gaggle that fills the space when I go to see it. Large-format, single-hue unframed canvases on the first floor, part of the artist’s most recent studies in landscape abstraction, attract my attention. Maybe I’m drawn to the particular colors of these two—daffodil yellow, icy gray-blue—or the physical properties of the paint, which seems to make the canvases glow; more works in the same vein in the gallery at the end of the ramp don’t have the same absorbing effect. Older works, like fragmented portraits of New York School artist Joe Brainard and Allen Ginsberg, have an exciting, cinematic dynamism, and the image of Ada del Moro, Katz’s wife of sixty-five years, appears as a compelling constant in the show, her aging face marking the passage of time and the evolutions in Katz’s style. My favorites, though, are a trio of sunny landscapes fr…