“Sooner or Later,” a sculpture by the artist Mark di Suvero outside the Brooklyn Museum shortly after its installation, near the front door. It was a gift of the artist Alex Katz.Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times
Alex Katz admired a Mark di Suvero sculpture and gave it to the Brooklyn Museum. It now has pride of place in the museum’s 200th anniversary celebration.
Consider two artists, now both in their 90s and both still working, who do not know each other personally despite coming up in the New York art scene around the same time.
One of them, Alex Katz, became the painter of some of the most recognizable portraits of our age, the other, Mark di Suvero, a welder of huge steel sculptures that are ubiquitous wherever outdoor art is found.
This is not a buddy comedy setup, but rather the philanthropic back story behind the recent permanent installation of a nearly 15-foot-tall abstract sculpture by di Suvero, “Sooner or Later” (2022), on the plaza in front of the Brooklyn Museum.
The work is a gift to the museum from the Alex Katz Foundation, picked out by the painter himself, to honor the museum’s 200th anniversary.
Katz, 97 and still making new paintings, went back to Paula Cooper Gallery three times to see it, before making the purchase; the gallery said that similar works are priced in a range from $3 million and $5 million.
“I saw it in the window and thought it was fantastic,” said Katz, known for his striking, flattened and highly stylized portraits, frequently taking his wife, Ada, as a subject. (He had a large retrospective at the Guggenheim that began in 2022.)
“I thought. ‘What the hell? Let’s get it.’”
Di Suvero’s “Sooner or Later” is a steel piece that sports a curving area on one side and short, rectangular segments on the other, with a demolition claw and a chain toward the center.
“This piece is like a culmination of his life,” Katz said of di Suvero. “It has an internal power as well as an outer power. It’s really the spirit of the Italian Baroque.”
He added, “If you took down a Bernini” — the 17th-century Italian sculptor — “and put up this piece, it wouldn’t be much of a loss.”
Katz, a lifelong New Yorker who was born in Brooklyn, established the foundation in 2004, and it has given more than 800 works to museums. He recently gave the Brooklyn Museum a 1986 Sigmar Polke painting, “Graphite painting with loops (after Dürer).”
Anne Pasternak, the Brooklyn Museum’s director, said that his current gift was part of “the long history of artists who collect their contemporaries.”
The work was the first by di Suvero to enter the collection.
The 200th anniversary kicks off on Oct. 5 with a weekend-long birthday bash and the opening of “Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art” — the reinstallation of its American Art collection — and “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition,” featuring work by more than 200 local artists.
One similarity between Katz and di Suvero is their intense work ethic. “I made 32 paintings this summer,” Katz said. “It’s insane. I don’t know what else to do.”
Di Suvero, who just turned 91 and lives in Bodega Bay, Calif., pointed out that he has a Brooklyn connection, too: In the 1960s he had a studio in the Greenpoint neighborhood.
The gift was especially surprising, he said, since, “I don’t know Alex Katz,” di Suvero said. “I don’t think I’d recognize him if I walked into a room full of people and he was there.”
Di Suvero made his name with abstract sculptures made of steel I-beams, and 10 of his works are on view at the Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley.
The sculptures have always been laborious to construct. Di Suvero does not send out plans to be fabricated elsewhere, and does not make drawings or maquettes beforehand; he works on the materials directly in his studio in Petaluma, Calif., and a large crane is employed to move the pieces around, as well as to bend them.
He gets some help from assistants, but for “Sooner or Later,” he said, “I made all the cuts and welds myself.”
When asked if he might make a reciprocal donation, buying an Alex Katz painting and giving it to the Brooklyn Museum or elsewhere, he chuckled.
“I don’t know,” di Suvero said. “That’s a good idea, though. If I do that, I’ll tell him it was your idea.”
— Ted Loos