Continuing in its tradition as one of the most significant jewels in the crown of New England museums, the Addison Gallery of American Art (on the campus of Phillips Academy, a few miles due north in Andover) outshines even its own opulent past with two exquisitely crafted, radically distinct, and unexpectedly complementary new shows. “Alex Katz: Small Paintings” and “Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures” offer a compelling and faceted look at three centuries of American portrait painting of a particular kind, the decidedly diminutive. Were Emily Dickinson alive and a curator, she’d have mounted these shows.

In this era of Ferris-wheel art (i.e., the bigger, the brighter, the better), it takes visual daring and almost transcendent self-assurance to present a pair of shows in which no single work qualifies as large, let alone gargantuan. You could fit most of these two exhibits into a couple of steamer trunks. Ranging in dimension from a minuscule pair of 19th-century thumbnail-sized portraits embedded in a pair of men’s cufflinks (two even smaller gold rings allegedly also hold images, but only your ophthalmologist knows for sure) to a double-sided Alex Katz painting that measures in at about the height and width of a microwave oven, both shows eschew grandiosity. Instead, they aim at (and achieve) grandeur, but grandeur of the subtlest kind: meticulously wrought, self-effacing in scale, personal in appeal. Many of the post-colonial and early American miniatures were made into brooches, pendants, and bracelets, shrunken visages of the living (or dead) that served to remind those who commissioned them of the likenesses of their beloved. Even though these faces functioned as the centerpieces of jewelry, I don’t think of them as decorative. They’re not baubles, they’re memory.

At first glance, the parallel between “Small Paintings” and “Love and Loss” seems superficial. The “Small Paintings” are not tiny, Katz’s style is modern, and his ambitions differ from those of the itinerant painters of 18th- and 19th-century American miniatures whose social and artistic prominence foretold the American love affair with photography. Indeed, Katz is known not for small paintings but for large — demure he isn’t. Yet he wrings from the sparest and smallest number of elements an orchestral timbre.

Katz makes big, flat, kinetic paintings of simplified figures against backdrops of flat, unanimated color. Those bold backgrounds of unembellished hue appear to push into the foreground the moving, idiosyncratic bodies of his subjects, which themselves have been reduced to the fewest possible details. It’s in this contrast that his oils achieve their intensity, in the way the background void plays against the foreground quasi-void of men and women. And the subjects themselves wear facial details of such minimized exactitude — the arch of an eyebrow, the tug at the corner of a mouth, the lines that join a nose to a face — that their simple expressions resonate like whispers in an empty amphitheater.

In the way it integrates the close-up of his subject’s face with the dynamics of its closely cropped background, Katz’s 1973 Study for Swimmer signals the subtlety and maturity of his later accomplishments. A vertical head rises from horizontal waves, yet both water and visage comprise the same pared-down swaths of pigment and the same beige and brown hues. Earlier portraits — Paul Taylor (1964) or Red Smile (1963) or Ada in Pillbox Hat (1961) — seem staged, almost didactic; the control can be suffocating. But Swimmer does not depend on a model’s stillness, and, lo, he breathes. Where other Katz portraits of this time depict their subjects’ fixed smiles, emotionless eyes, and sharply pursed lips against denuded backdrops that suggest the walls of interrogation chambers, the young man with the long hair and the Asian eyes is caught in the moment of taking in air. His almost audible gasp gives life to what had been largely a series of stagings.

It should come as no surprise that a painter whose work frequently courts narrative — Katz’s characters and geography are so defined that his paintings are an open invitation to make up stories — should find human lips among his most compelling motifs. And “Small Paintings” describes the evolution of those lips. Compare Oval Ada of 1958 with the Black Scarf of 38 years later. It’s the difference between a mask and a mouth, a convention and a gesture, a motionless statue and a sidelong glance. Oval Ada approaches in spirit one of the “Love and Loss” miniatures: it’s a personal keepsake in the form of a likeness. Black Scarf is meant for everybody, as a different, aged Ada looks down with a combination of disapproval and weary condescension from the summit of her inarticulate sorrow.

The physically closer Katz gets to his subjects, the better the work, no matter whether the person he’s painting develops into a portrait, like Ada (1990) or Peter (1995), or into something less traditional like Green Shoes (1987). All we see in Green Shoes are a woman’s legs (below the knees) and her footwear; yet the painting insinuates a tension between the woman’s public and private selves. The legs themselves lie sun-drenched and horizontal, their leisurely crossed ankles and apparent nakedness (no stocking seam or pantyhose net in sight) suggesting that she’s basking by a pool. The shoes are another matter: with their shop-window perfection and sensible heels, they register as both new and purposeful — these are pumps meant for office or church, not a backyard barbecue. You start to wonder whether those crossed ankles don’t have more to do with decorum than with leisure — the woman is not wearing slacks, so the skirt or dress she (presumably) has on has dictated the position of her outstretched legs. What initially registers as supine nonchalance gradually gives way to a sense of someone very much aware she’s on view. The casualness is all an act.

The opposite seems true of “Love and Loss,” in which the formality seems all an act. By slow degrees, the minuscule paintings of the heads and shoulders of handsome men and beautiful women in the elaborate, stiff garments of their class and era stop looking like shrunken commemorative dishes from an Enlightenment tourist shop. Instead, the rich, personal history of each portrait’s subject and the stories surrounding each painting’s commission transform the exhibit from historical exercise to something like a family album. In this case, the family happens to be all America, which is why the juxtaposition of Alex Katz’s “Small Paintings” with “Love and Loss” proves inspired. In entirely different ways, but from a similar spiritual source, Alex Katz paints all of America as well.

Issue Date: May 31- June 7, 2001