O’Hara went on to describe “a ‘void’ of smoothly painted colour, as smoothly painted as the figure itself, where the fairly realistic figure existed (but did not rest) in a space which had no floor, no walls, no source of light, no viewpoint”. He added that Katz’s “stayed in the picture as solutions of a formal problem, neither existential nor lost, neither deprived nor dismayed”.
It’s a reminder that art and poetry have long thrived in proximity. One thinks of Titian’s friendship with the poet Pietro Aretino, who was in effect the Venetian master’s propagandist. Aretino described how, in a now lost painting of Saint John the Baptist, the areas of flesh are “so well coloured that in their freshness they resemble snow streaked with vermillion and are moved by the pulsations and warmth of living spirits”.
