Pop-up exhibitions can either be surprisingly inventive, commingling content with locale for innovative, imaginative purposes, or they can invariably feel provisional and akin to curatorial disaster areas. Alex Katz’s week-long exhibition “West Broadway and Spring” presented by the London-based gallery Timothy Taylor, coincided with the third edition of Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design art fair. The show was a startlingly bold project, augmenting the growing international position of the fair with its expanding roster of foreign participants and its market potential. While this wasn’t the first time the work of the now 89-year-old American artist was shown in Shanghai—James Cohan Gallery Shanghai presented his work in 2011—“West Broadway and Spring” was certainly the largest presentation of Katz’s paintings that included both a mix of the artist’s iconic portraits of women as well as several sizable and optically-charged landscape paintings.

Presented in a two-story building across from the West Bund Art Center where the fair was held, the exhibition space wasn’t without challenges. A severely sloped concrete floor made the hanging of the work difficult given that some of the landscape paintings were as large as five-meters long, such as White Roses 9 (2012) or White Pine 2 (2003), with its tranquil, olive green background and a flurry of dark windswept branches, greeting visitors upon entering the space. Installation obstacles aside, the show presented nine major works, nearly all made within the last five years, with the exception of White Pines 2. Each painting embodies Katz’s pioneering style, a singular, accessible vernacular that predates the arrival of Pop Art and defies the lingering hangover of Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s, which set Katz apart from other artists of his generation. 

While still a student in 1949 at Cooper Union School of Art in New York, Katz, at age 22, had a choice of summer schools: Yale or Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Katz went to Maine. It was there that things began to gel, not only in the way of subject matter but also his abiding commitment to make art for the rest of his life. Since 1950, Katz’s has made Maine his summer home. He has, however, never romanticized the long shadows of tradition of other American landscape painters, notably John Marin or Marsden Hartley, who were also profoundly inspired by Maine’s rugged seacoast and wild natural beauty. Then there’s the other side of the artist, the urbane chronicler of cosmopolitan life who painted glamorous portraits of women and fashionable friends, cocktail parties, those of New York School poets, and dancers—the inner circle of his chic downtown New York community—and also of his immediate family, his son Vincent and his wife Vivien and, of course, Katz’s wife Ada whom he has painted throughout his entire career.