Schuyler, James

For almost fifty years, the American artist Alex Katz (b. 1927) has painted a series of portraits of his wife, Ada. This beautifully illustrated book is the first to focus on these iconic paintings, which are unprecedented in their focus on a single figure over many years.
In this volume, leading scholars explore the allure of Ada as a subject and the art-historical importance of Katz’s portraits, asking fascinating questions about Katz’s methods and intentions: What do these paintings reveal and conceal about their subject? What does Katz do in the studio to convey such vitality on his canvases? How does Katz’s work fit into the history of portraiture and the art movements of the 1960s and beyond? Acclaimed art critic and curator Robert Storr examines Ada’s alluring persona, comparing her to other “goddesses” who have captivated centuries of portrait painters. James Schuyler recounts a day in Katz’s studio, and the late British art critic Lawrence Alloway explores the role of repetition in the Ada portraits, which he views as a cycle of images with antecedents in Velázquez and Rembrandt.
Featuring the renowned series of Ada portraits, this book demonstrates the cumulative power and enduring delight of Alex Katz’s achievement, as well as his devotion to his greatest muse.

Schuyler's diary also served as a commonplace--in the other sense of the word-book. Quotes range from John Webster's great play The Duchess of Malfi to several passages from the memoir of Harry Daley, E.M. Forster's policeman lover; and Nathan Kernan has carefully annotated sources and filled in lacunae. Who knew that Cardinal Spellman's camp nickname was Minnie? What a delight to come upon the name of that Hitchcock-film actress Nova Pilbeam! James Schuyler thought himself as an observer, not a philosopher, but his poetry and prose are filled with decisive moments. Unlike some artists' personal records, his don't seem as if they were written with an eye to future publication. That doesn't decrease their casual intensity.

In Schuyler's long pieces, such as "Hymn to Life," "The Morning of the Poem," and "A Few Days," he casually reverses the romantic position: anti-didactic, anti-epiphanic, he trusts his imagination and resists any psychological theorizing about why one memory, one perception, is connected to another. He mistrusts monumentality. Wisdom, he knows, is enervating: "Things should get better as you / grow older, but that / is not the way. The way is inscrutable and hard to / handle." But long or short, Collected Poems is a record of discoveries, and each one is marked by Schuyler's terrific antennae and gift of tonal rightness. (The same qualities are on ample, if more casual, display in the poet's diary.) There's no question that he is among the most formidable and most observant poets of postwar America. Indeed, his attractively quotidian elegy for W.H. Auden is a far more subtle poem than the endlessly quoted tour de force that Auden dedicated to W.B. Yeats: <blockquote> I don't have to burn his
letters as he asked his
friends to do: they were lost
a long time ago. So much
to remember, so little to
say: that he liked martinis
and was greedy about the wine?
I always thought he would live
to a great age. He did not.
Wystan, kind man and great poet,
goodbye.
</blockquote> Nobody thought that James Schuyler would live to a great age. But the death of this "kind man and great poet" in 1991 felt no less cruelly premature. --Mark Rudman

"An extraordinarily rich and compelling book, a wonder . . . the perfect companion to his brilliant and memorable poems."-Paul Auster</p>