Canoe

Throughout Alex Katz's work, the most ordinary sights can take on an almost iconic quality. Who but Katz would have chosen to paint, from the experience of an American summer vacation, an empty canoe? And who else would expand it to life-size dimensions across a 12-foot canvas, and then float it horizontally on a symbollic sea of abstract blue water? Both as real and unreal as its barely broken reflection in the still water, the canoe delights and awes us by transforming a lakeside commonplace into an object of mysterious fixity, eternally moored in a horizonless space. The leisure rhythms of summer have been magically preserved in a broad design which, like Katz's simplified modeling in clean-hewn planes, is at once innocent and artful.