ML Riley takes in “Cartoon Drawing of Junction,” left, and the painting “Junction” at the Colby Museum of Art.  Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

Alex Katz is one of those polarizing artists people either love or hate. While I have never been possessed by either extreme with regard to his work, I admit to dwelling in purgatory of shrugging indifference.

In my other life – as a design writer for various publications – I have frequently encountered Katz’s paintings in the homes of the wealthy who are the stock in trade of many interiors magazines. I couldn’t even count on two hands the number of these residences where a Katz portrait took pride of place. As the great decorator Billy Baldwin observed of his impossibly well-heeled Palm Beach clientele: they “all want the same kind of different thing.”

It’s easy to see why Katz’s portraits have become vanity purchases among the blue-chip art set. They have a kind of cinematic glamour, an unabashedly extravagant use of saturated color and an almost comic book graphic simplicity that makes them not only superficially easy to grasp, but also impactful in a contemporary interior. Perhaps my overexposure to these slick images – and their de rigueur presence as markers of status – worked on me like a hit of Xanax, until my jaded reaction to Katz’s output (save for his tree paintings) registered little more than a yawn.

I am happy to report, however, that while I’m still not an avid fan, “Alex Katz: Theater & Dance” at the Colby Museum (through Feb. 19) left me with more appreciation for his holistic approach to these art forms, as well as for the many layers of his process. Both reveal more depth beneath a body of work I’d dismissed mostly as formulaic and facile. I would venture to say, in fact, that with this show Katz reveals his best self, or at least that his collaborations with the performing arts engaged more of him than his society portraiture and other subjects have. (By comparison, his concurrent Guggenheim retrospective in New York isn’t exactly inspiring raves.)

The exhibition was assembled by the renowned curator and critic Robert Storr, Katz himself and Colby’s curatorial team. Storr’s hand is immediately visible in the first gallery through his imaginative hanging of various large-scale portraits of performers and “Dancers” paintings that isolate a torso, a pair of legs, heads and shoulders of dancing couples, and various other interesting compositional croppings.

In her essay for the excellent exhibition catalog, Colby’s former Katz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Diana Tuite offers two salient observations about Katz’s style. First, she describes him as “an artist who privileges surface over recessive space and who cultivates an abiding sensitivity to light, scale, gesture, and the expressiveness of clothing.” Secondly, she writes, “Katz has spoken about habitually stepping into movie theaters during breaks from his studio in the 1950s and 1960s. Disembodied heads … were very much in line with Katz’s shift to large-scale paintings that imitated the distortionary imbalances (‘a big head on one side’) of wide-screen cinema.”

Women walk out of a gallery at the Colby Museum of Art that is showing the first comprehensive works of artist Alex Katz in his collaboration with theater and dance artists, dating back several decades. Paintings, clockwise from left are “Dancers 5,” “Dancers 11,” “Dancers 14, Dancers 19,” all oil on linen made in 2019. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

We see all of this in the opening gallery. But Storr has paired canvases in seemingly random fashion – the upper half of a dancing couple with the feet of another dancer, paintings offset from each other instead of in neat lines or grids. I say “seemingly random” because it’s clear to me that what Storr was going for here was anything but. He is deliberately initiating a kinetic energy that recreates the sensation of dancers moving within a space. It works like a charm. I was hooked.

The other thing about the paintings in this gallery is their explosion of color. The privileging of “surface over recessive space” that Tuite points out here takes a different color dimension, particularly in works with intense cobalt blue grounds out of which faces pop, their visages sporting heavy red eye paint and splotches of blue-green (recalling Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat” and “The Green Line”).

Katz also mostly abandons his habit of depicting his subjects as flinty, remote or ambiguous, something that I understand considering the cultural revolution in which he came of age as a painter – think of the hollow, unhappy souls merely going through the motions of Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate” – but that have also made his work less approachable. The characters in many of these paintings are actually smiling, even ecstatic. Lastly, one whole side of some faces have no defined outline, but bleed into a rich expanse of color. Stunning.

“George Washington Crossing the Delaware: Burning Logs 2,” 1968, left, and set pieces for “Diggity,” 1978 by Alex Katz on display at the Colby Museum of Art in Waterville. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

The next gallery contains displays props, annotated costume sketches and freestanding cutout paintings from Katz’s sets for various productions. There are the ebullient robin cutouts from Kenneth Koch’s play “The Red Robins,” and a dog and campfire from his “George Washington Crossing the Delaware.” (Tuite relates a story of Katz reclaiming elements of the latter production so he could cut them up and sell them as individual paintings, which reveals a shrewdness uncommon to most artists, but that also helps explain his storied drive for success.)

But the most interesting thing in this gallery are Katz’s costume designs for – and a portrait and drawing of a dancer from – Paul Taylor’s 1961 dance, “Junction.” In these we comprehend the way Katz considers the body as an object in space, how it will move and what it will reveal through that movement. These are considerations shared by both painters and costume designers, but usually in completely different contexts – the painter focused on the aim of creating a static picture that expresses movement, the costume designer intent on the eventual three-dimensional effects of what is being designed.

Katz not only straddles both disciplines; he also thinks like a choreographer, which points to the holistic vision behind these creative collaborations, an approach that transcends mere painting. This becomes fascinatingly apparent in the next gallery, in a video of a production of “Junction.” Tuite quotes Katz in the catalog as saying, “Dance costumes can really help the energy of the piece a lot.”

Katz designed body suits with mainly one color on the front and one on the back. Later, Katz himself, in a caption about “Junction,” writes, “I put bright colors on the leotards, so when the dancers spun, the colors rotated and energy would come off the bodies.” But something else wondrous happens as the spinning commences: an illusion that one dancer actually disappears and a new one materializes to complete the turn. It’s thrilling.

Another revelation is Katz’s use of Renaissance techniques. Artists of that era who were developing ideas for a large-scale painting would do several preparatory sketches using pencil, charcoal and/or oil on panel. Once they were satisfied with their composition, they would cut paper to the scale of the intended painting, draw its forms on it, then make pin pricks or use a tool resembling a tailor’s spiky tracing wheel to puncture a track of tiny holes along the drawn lines. Finally, they would tap a loosely woven bag filled with coal dust along the lines so that the powder would penetrate the holes, leaving the lines directly on the canvas or wall. This was called a cartoon.

Technology has eased this process by enabling artists to simply project the image onto the canvas and directly trace the figures. But in several circumstances, Katz chose to prepare his monumental paintings the old-fashioned way. His oil-on-panel study for one such painting, inspired by Paul Taylor’s dance “Last Look,” hangs next to the cartoon he created for it. (Unfortunately, the final work is not in the show.)

Women walk past the work “Pas de Deux,” oil on canvas, 1983 by Alex Katz at the Colby Museum of Art in Waterville. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

Certainly, there is also knowledge of Renaissance stylistic devices in a large multi-panel painting of five art world couples that, though unrelated to Katz’s theater and dance endeavors, nevertheless illuminates what Tuite refers to as his sensitivity to gesture. The first thing one notices in this painting is the panoply of hand gestures that guide our eye from one side of the work to the other.

In Renaissance – and on through Mannerism and Baroque periods – hand gestures represented an entire clandestine iconography. Art historians have speculated that hands grasping, pointing toward the heavens, laying on a chest or hip could be code for many things: a recognition among crypto-Jews of their purely outward conversion to Christianity in the 16th century, a symbol of kinship with the De’ Medici family, a penitence for one’s sins, even a reference to Satanism. Hand gestures also often conveyed meanings in silent spiritual communications among saints portrayed in religious “sacra conversazione” paintings.

The gestures in this epic Katz work feel so premeditated that it’s hard not to believe he’s intentionally carrying this tradition into contemporary painting. But whether this is the case or not, if one wanders back through the galleries, we suddenly pay more attention to the gestures of the dancers.

Lastly, for those who want to fully immerse themselves in this exhibition, I highly recommend reading David Salle’s essay for the catalog, “Staging Pictures.” It is brilliant. Even the most skeptical of Katz detractors will find great value there.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com