Spotlight: Katz & Copley

Spotlight: Katz & Copley

AUGUST 23 – DECEMBER 10, 2021

MAIN GALLERY

Spotlight / Katz & Copley highlights two paintings from WFU Art Collections. Both Alex Katz’s Vincent with an Open Mouth and John Singleton Copley’s Portrait of Mrs. Daniel Rogers, Elizabeth Gorham Rogers have recently undergone conservation, and presenting them together allows an opportunity to discuss the processes applied to repair them, compare two American portraits separated by more than 200 years, and to see these two works of portraiture in light of our age of the Selfie. There is continuity from the life-sized Copley, to the huge scale of the Katz, to the many images you might have on the small screen of your smartphone of you or your friends. A number of the newly acquired contemporary works in the adjacent exhibition, Means of Identification, are also “portraits,” linking these surprisingly diverse works.

John Singleton Copley’s Portrait of Mrs. Daniel Rogers, Elizabeth Gorham Rogers, dates from 1762. Copley is one of the most renowned colonial-era painters, known for portraits of important figures such as Paul Revere, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams, as well as for dramatic scenes such as the National Gallery’s Watson and the Shark (1778). By the date of the portrait, Copley was the leading portrait painter in the American colonies.The political events of the late 1760s and early 1770s split Copley’s clientele into opposing camps. Some of his patrons were Patriots and radicals; some were Loyalists. In Boston, Copley was especially impacted by the increased political turmoil in the wake of the Boston Tea Party of December 1773. His father-in-law had been one of the merchants who was supposed to receive the tea dumped in the harbor. This unrest, along with the desire for the esteem and seriousness associated with European art practices, spurred his departure for London in June 1774. 

The subject of this portrait is Elizabeth Gorham. A daughter of Colonel John Gorham and Elizabeth Allen, of Barnstable, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, where her father was a member of the King’s army. She later married Mr. Daniel Rogers, a prominent merchant in Gloucester. The painting has a remarkable provenance. It remained within the family for generations; there was only one previous owner outside of the family before it was purchased by Mr. R. Philip Hanes in the early 1970s and then gifted to Wake Forest University in 1991.

Alex Katz began concentrating on casual portraiture of family and friends in the late 1950s. Vincent with an Open Mouth, from 1970, represents his ten-year-old son. Here he extends his distinctive approach to painting the human face: large scale, drastic cropping, flattened surfaces, economy of line, and sharp juxtapositions of scale to create a particularly imposing image. Katz was one the first artists to return to figurative painting following Abstract Expressionism’s dominance in the 1950s. His simplification of forms and elimination of detail relates to hard-edged Color-Field painting and to Pop Art’s emulation of commercial graphics, two early 1960s styles that influenced him. Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.” 

Katz’s prolific output of portraits – including over 250 of his wife and muse, Ada – reveals a fascination with human nature and yet the artist is never one to dwell on inner psychology. The changing quality of light and strong contrasts of sun and shade across the face further indicate Katz’s interest in the specific moment. 

Born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York, Katz attended the Cooper Union School of Art and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. During the mid-1950s, Katz fell into the small circle of artists known as the 10th Street Scene, which included Larry Rivers and Fairfield Porter. His works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Tate Modern in London; and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., among others. Vincent with an Open Mouth is part of the Student Union Collection of Contemporary Art and was acquired by Wake Forest students in 1973.

Organization

WFU Art Collections and Hanes Gallery

Image Credit

Alex Katz (American, b. 1927)
Vincent with an Open Mouth, 1970, oil on canvas

John Singleton Copley 
Portrait of Mrs. Daniel Rogers, Elizabeth Gorham Rogers, 1762, Oil on Linen
Donated to WFU by Charlotte and R. Philip Hanes
The Philip and Charlotte Hanes Wake Forest University Art Collection