When the American painter Agnes Martin found the plot of land on which she wanted to settle in New Mexico -after a year of living off grid in a camper van to cure her disillusion with the New York art world -she knew exactly who to call.
I say call, but actually, she couldn’t call Bill Katz, because at the time–1973–he didn’t own a telephone.Instead, Martin had to drive back to New York, to Katz's apartment inSoHo, where she proceeded to hurl coins at his second storey window, in the middle of the night.
“I woke up to a tap, tap, tap,” says Katz, “and I thought, ‘who the heck is throwing pennies?' She came up, told me she’d found this wonderful spot, and would I help her build a log cabin.” The pair went for breakfast at the Algonquin Hotel, where they were still sat talking, making plans, when the waiters began laying for dinner. “They moved us to the lobby, and when the sun began to set and we still weren’t done, we walked downtown. We talked about what she was doing. Where she was going. Where she wanted to be. That’s how I got to know Agnes.”
Martin isn’t the only member of artist royalty to call on Katz for his advice. Over the years, he has designed homes, studios and exhibition spaces for Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer, the gallerists Dominique Levy and Matthew Marks, Pace, Phillips de Pury, and the collector/philanthropist Emily Fisher Landau. "We chose to work with Bill precisely because of his reputation for building spaces that artists love," says Pace Gallery's founder, Arne Glimcher.
Katz also makes stage sets–the Bolshoi and Ballet Rambert are some of those to have called on his expertise–and advises those in the know on redesigning or building a home from the ground up. The actress Lauren Hutton and the designer Diane von Furstenberg, for example. Oh, and he also curates, though he would deny the role. “I just choose pictures,” he says, modestly, though it transpires he does a great deal more than that.
Katz is tall and classically handsome, with wide, kind eyes and a sculptural jaw. Beneath a black puffergilet, the cuffs of his woollen sweater are a little frayed. His grey scarf is knotted tightly about his neck, because in the 48 hours since he arrived in London, he has managed to catch a cold.
We have met today, at Lévy Gorvy gallery in Old Bond Street, to talk about an exhibition of pastel drawings by the Italian-born American artist Francesco Clemente. The two men have been friends for decades - they own adjoining plots of land in New Mexico, of which more anon - but it was Levy who asked Katz to “curate” the show.
“Francesco gave me every pastel he ever did,” Katz tells me, “from which I had to choose just 40”. He was looking, he says, for “the magic that Francesco is able to express”. Katz chooses visually, he adds, “not chronologically, not thematically. Just visually. And when I’d finished, I made a little map of them on the floor, to show him. His wife, Alba, said the sweetest thing: ‘Look, Bill made a poem of your work’.”
Katz, who also helped Clemente design his 1991 Royal Academy exhibition, Three Worlds, and his 1999 retrospective at the Guggenheim, had every pastel for the new show framed, or reframed, in uniform pale wood, without the wide mount that galleries usually favour. He did this in the name of immediacy, he says, but also simplicity, which is his - you could say - his sine qua non. He also made Lévy Gorvy repaint their walls and install a new one to cover two windows that “disrupted” the feel of the room. “When people walk into a building, they should have a sense of something, but not of the building itself,” he has said.
A decade ago, Katz requested the same of Kiefer, when remodelling the German artist’s Paris hideout–60,000 square feet of studio and living space colonised from a former 17th century townhouse and its grounds in the Marais–filling in windows, hollowing out arches, burrowing through floorboards. “Bill is very minimal, very intellectual, and he doesn’t compromise,” Kiefer told W magazine at the time, in an article that described him as art royalty’s consigliere - their most trusted advisor.
Katz and Kiefer have been friends for more than 20 years. They were introduced by the late Cy Twombly, whom Katz was walking with in Paris when Twombly spotted Kiefer across the street. “I know you,” Kiefer said, “ you’re the guy who helps artists with exhibitions, I wonder if you'd ever help me?”
Not long after, Katzfound himself designing Kiefer’s other workspace, a 200-acre campus in the south of France. Katz also helps with Kiefer’s exhibitions. He defused a spat between Kiefer and his curators for the artist’s 2007 exhibition at the Grand Palais, then redesigned the layout so that everyone was happy. Katz also helped curators at the RA when the same show was in London–those two jerky towers in the Annenberg courtyard that everyone went wild for? Thank Katz.
How does he handle people who want to do something he doesn’t like? “They wouldn’t have asked me to work for them,” he says, smiling. “I also only work with people I like.”
Katz is softly spoken and exquisitely polite. He emanates calm. “People tell me that,” he says, when I remark on it. His secret weapon, he thinks, is that “I figure out what people want.” After that, he goes with the flow, “because you always end up where you are supposed to be.”
Katz started out in Sixties New York, helping artists such as Robert Indiana, Marisol, Ellsworth Kelly, Martin and Twombly in their studios, stretching canvases, making posters, and so on. “I had no profession,” he says.
If he needed a poster, “I’d often go to Andy,” Katz says. As in, Andy Warhol. No biggie. “The strange thing was, back then, New York was a very fluid kind of place, so people just did those things.” One night, he tells me, he called David Hockney, “and I said, ‘David, we have this benefit, and we need a cover for the programme’. David said, ‘Oh good, when do you need it?’ And I told him –‘tonight’. He paused and then just said, ‘I’m going to dinner, can you come at 1.30am?’ It sounds kind of make-believe, doesn’t it? But that was what it was like.”
These days, Katz divides his time between his SoHo apartment and, as often as he can, his place in New Mexico. He bought 80 acres of land there in the Eighties, “on the spur of moment; it was like play acting - I shocked myself,” he says.
Initially, Katz asked a friend, the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Arata Isozaki to design his house, “but I made a floor plan to show him, with a square courtyard and L-shaped house around it, and a deck around that, so it was a square within a square within a square, and he looked at it for a long time, and he said, ‘You know Bill, why don’t you design the house and I’ll confer’. Well, the next time I saw him, the house was finished–I guess I had had it in me, even though I didn’t know it.”
True to form, Katz’s New Mexico house only has one window–above the bath, so he can lie and look at the clouds - though the south and eastern sides are almost entirely French doors, through which he has an astonishing view of the Rocky mountains. He shows me a photo of it on his iPhone, thick clouds billowing over the mountain tops, piercing blue sky above.
“Oh” I say, a little lost for words.
“I know” he replies.
There isn’t another dwelling– nor any evidence of human life at all, in fact–between his house and the horizon in the far distance. “I’ve been very careful, not telling anybody about it,” he says. “Between Francesco, Lauren and another friend, [the British artist] Andrew Lord, we have about 1000 acres now, so it will stay that way. My driveway is a mile long.”
Katz is currently helping Hutton develop a trio of Quonset huts on her plot. “One of the three is a studio, for her to make artworks. And then in the main house, before, she had to climb the stairs to sleep. I said, ‘Lauren, you’re in your seventies, let’s do it on one floor.’”
Also a mile away (“I didn’t want anything to disturb the look of the house”) is his garden, a slab of dug ground covered in homemade compost in which he grows vegetables. He grew them as a child, in New Jersey, and telling me about it brings him on to the time he and the late Louise Nevelson, a sculptor who lived near him in the Bowery, decided to pay the legendary Georgia O’Keeffe a visit at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, in the Sixties.
“Louise dressed for it as if she was going to opening night at the Metropolitan opera,” says Katz. “Gown, cap, jewellery, triple eyelashes. As we approached the Ranch, I saw a white Lincoln convertible speeding across the desert, and I knew it must be Miss O’Keeffe. She answered the door dressed in denim, and she drank beer from a thimble. At lunch, she served carrots that were only a little bigger than the tines of a fork, and she said, ‘Who let these carrots overgrow?’”
Later, when Katz was working on Martin’s log cabin nearby, he’d go to visit O’Keeffe when Agnes was meditating. “She only liked to do things by inspirations, so if we had a technical problem, that was how she got the answer. I’d come back after a few hours, and there’d be an apple pie baking, which meant she’d worked it out. ‘Agnes,’ I’d say, ‘what is the answer to our building problem?’ And she’d say something like, ‘horizontal, and vertical’.”
In recent years, Katz has been working on “more than half a dozen” buildings on a 100-acre estate in Connecticut for the artist Jasper Johns. Diane von Furstenberg has also enlisted his help, both for her 2014 touring exhibition, Journey of a Dress, and in designinga building to house her considerable archive. She has also commissioned him to build homes for her mother, her son and daughter and, latterly, for herself, again in Connecticut. Prior to that, Katz says, the former barn she was living in “was on the ground, it didn’t have proper insulation, and in the winter, when her grandchildren came to visit, they’d find her in bed with a fur coat and hat on. She said to me: ‘I don’t want them to remember me like this!’”
Lots of Katz’s clients gift him things. Currentlyhe has an 11-foot watercolour by Clemente on his bedroom wall in New Mexico, and an abstractsculpture by the late Ellsworth Kelly in his courtyard, though he also owns works -plural -byRobert Rauschenberg and Twombly, among others. “I’m an accumulator, not a collector,” he says, when I ask him about it, though he does make a point of buying work by younger artists, “because it can change their lives”.
His biggest donator thusfar seems to be Kiefer, who has sent him so many thank you artworks over the years that eventually Katz had to build a building to house them all. “One of them arrived atmy home in New York, and when it got there, it weighed 700 pounds–I couldn’t even get it up the stairs.” These days, it resides in New Mexico, at Katz’s “Kiefer Pavillion”, as he terms it.It’s a corrugated structure and – you guessed it – a mile away from the house. Nothing, it seems, even multi million-pound artworks, will come between Katz and hisview.
Francesco Clemente: Pastels is atLévy Gorvy until Feb 15 levygorvy.com
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