Good-life Ada: a recent exhibition generously sampled Alex Katz's many portraits of his wife, Ada, providing a synopsis of the artist's career and a microcosm of an era

An exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum of Mex Katz's portraits of his wife, Ada Katz, offered unique testimony in the annals of postwar modernism to the healthy persistence of that seemingly moribund chestnut: a muse. The show spanned almost five decades, 1957 to 2005--nearly the same duration as the Katzes' continuing marriage, which began in 1958, and almost the length of his career. Perhaps no woman in modern art has inspired so many portraits--there are more than 200 altogether, (1) some four dozen on view here--during so long and continuous a union.

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"Ada," as Alex has painted her, is more than a person, as the best portrait personas usually are. Whether or not other figures are present, and regardless of the inclusion of details of scenery or setting, the Ada paintings are as much a synechdochal view of an era as the depiction of an individual. Still, she is always recognizable as Ada, a dark-haired woman, petite in real life, who appears in the paintings as a giant face with fashionable accoutrements, billboard-style, or in group scenes as a serene, stylish pause in the action. The very subtle emotions unfolding from one painting to the next are those of a being set repeatedly before the gaze of others only to retain dominion over her privacy. It is a fine balance, and one that has guaranteed her longevity as a subject.

Because it covered Katz's career, the show included a wide sampling, from small early works brushily executed to painted aluminum cutouts and big paintings with broad, flat planes of matte, barely modulated colors. In a number of these works we catch snippets of the literary and artistic milieu in which the couple circulates, friends seen milling about a gallery or reading at the shore. Much is learned from Ada's clothing and her general look, which places her unequivocally in each decade of the era covered. Katz's rather empirical American approach, with observations gleaned from what is immediately at hand, and a tidy, almost proper sense of what is fit to show, sets him worlds apart from Picasso and other European avant-gardists, with their psychically charged, erotic portraits of multiple paramours. Like the Pop artists with whom he is sometimes misleadingly associated, Katz eschews the Cubists' probing of the recondite implications of perception. Harry Callahan, Alfred Stieglitz: perhaps photographers come closer in kind to Katz's discreet approach in photographing a wife and muse--though his feeling for time and detail is not that of photography. Katz does not record a single moment. A scene at the beach with friends or another of Ada, Mex and their son Vincent in the yard of a summer home collapses many such moments into a luminous suspension.

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Ada's glamour can resemble that of a film star, a point Robert Storr makes in his essay for the catalogue. (2) Caught in self-reflection, utterly possessed and content beneath her umbrella, a blue and red scarf covering her head and throat, and with raindrops lightly falling in white streaks across the picture plane, Ada is nowhere more filmic than in the pellucid Blue Umbrella 2 (1972), something on the scale of a movie screen and with a light-transfixed space through which she seems to glide.

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For the most part, the Ada pictures leave her intact--a far cry, say, from Picasso's portraits of Jacqueline Roque, in which, by contrast, the subject is torn to pieces. (Executed in the 1960s and early '70s, Picasso's Jacqueline paintings coincide with a portion of the works in the Katz show.) Even when Ada is seen more than once or in parts, she remains oddly whole as in a group of works in which she is duplicated one or more times on a single canvas or as an off-on-aluminum cutout in which the effect is more an expression of a quality of being with Ada than anything markedly deconstructive. The cutout Ada with Nose (1969-70) consists of two parts: her whole striding body on the left, with the front of her face displaced as she steps out of the bounds of an invisible frame and, at the right and facing left, that severed profile, blown up to the same height as her body (58 inches). The scale shift boosts an illusion that she is closer to us on the right than on the left and is watching herself walk offstage. This is as Cubist as it gets. It's a funny image, cartoonish, with her nose more a beak than almost anywhere else and the painter creating a composition that seems designed to disrupt a sense of unshakable aplomb. Still, Ada's expression remains untroubled, and her body is prim in its skirt and blazer, hand tucked in a pocket.

The early paintings of Ada, like Katz's pictures in general from the 1950s and early '60s, exhibit a gestural, handmade quality that was to become more elusive, though it remained, becoming increasingly refined, as Katz turned, by the mid-'60s, to a more finished look in large-format, sweeping views. (4) The early works are touching and sweet: Ada standing shyly, twice, arms crossed in front of her cobalt-blue dress (Ada Ada), 1959, or, in The Black Dress (1960), repeated six times wearing that timeless, understated attire, standing in various poses and (once) seated, in a room. In its artifice, its assertion of painting's power to inflect fantasy--even in its coy reference to the multiple viewpoints of Cubism--one suspects that this work, and others with such repetitions, are something of a meditation on the medium. Hanging on the wall in The Black Dress is Katz's painting of poet James Schuyler, showing him full-length, staring out toward us. Making them clearly painted people, Katz nonetheless suggests the social relation between the two (Schuyler was, in fact, one of the Katzes' close writer friends), as well as between those two figures (or seven, if we accept the joke) and the painter who is depicting them, and the viewer, and even people of a different time. We have all been drawn into the artist's pursuit.