This Way and That

The Portland Museum of Art displays the eclectic personal art collection of Alex Katz

- By James D. Balestrieri

Jane Freilicher (1924-2014), One Cat, Two Fish, 1974. Oil on linen, 50 x 63½ in. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Gift of the Alex Katz Foundation, 2023.37.12. © Estate of Jane Freilicher. Image courtesy Petegorsky/Gipe Photo.

There's an Alex Katz painting at the Milwaukee Art Museum that used to bug me as a kid. That I am thinking about it now, just as I am about to ruminate on Painting Energy: The Alex Katz Foundation Collection at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, suggests that the painting still, in some corner of my unconscious, bugs me. It's a big painting, 96 by 72, titled Sunny #4, and was painted in 1971. You won't see it in these pages. Suffice it to say that it is a depiction of the larger-than-life face of a sheepdog or maybe a terrier—“Sunny,” presumably— tongue out, looking out at us amiably from the vantage of tall marsh grasses growing at the edge of the Maine coast, which you can see in the background between the thing that bugged me: the dog's back (backs). Sunny's back, you see, goes in two impossible, shaggy directions at a 90-degree angle. Update: I have just visited this painting at the Milwaukee Art Museum. My family showed me yet another error of my youth. The “backs” aren't backs at all—they're ears, giant ears. Which only goes to show that misreading art is not only possible, it isn't even rare.