Union-News
Monday, September 17, 2001
By NANCY H. GONTER
HOLYOKE — While the music and acting of Frank Sinatra are well known to many, few are aware that the late entertainer also pursued a love of painting.
And while his most famous songs and movies are accessible and understandable to all, his paintings were abstract and difficult to comprehend.
Holyoke Community College art professor Victor G. Katz, 34, a native of northern New Jersey now living in Northampton, had studied Sinatra's work and focused on his painting.
When Katz, who began work at HCC this fall, was introduced at a recent meeting of the college's board of trustees, Vice President of Academic Affairs David H. Entin highlighted Katz's presentation of a paper on Sinatra's painting at a Hofstra University conference that focused solely on Sinatra.
Katz, who is teaching art history at HCC and who has a law degree and master's degree in the history of art at Yale University, has been interested in art and Sinatra since he was young.
"I grew up surrounded by art and coffee table books," he said.
When his family vacationed, they visited art museums.
Learning about Sinatra also had its roots in his youth.
"I had been listening to Sinatra my whole life," Katz said.
Sinatra's painting was a hobby for him for more than 40 years. He occasionally would talk about it when he performed, often in a self-deprecating way.
In 1991, he published a book of the abstract paintings he did in the 1980s. Titled "A Man and His Art," the book included an introduction by his daughter Tina Sinatra. The book is out-of-print and available in very few libraries, Katz said.
Sinatra's paintings are an example of his longing to be involved in "high art," Katz said.
In his music, Sinatra dabbled with classical music and tried conducting. At the same time, he seemed "almost embarrassed by his own pretension," Katz said.
"He would end his forays into high culture with Amos and Andy," he said.
While he seemed ambivalent about whether he was involved in high art or not with his music, Sinatra was clear when it came to his painting.
"The paintings don't make sense in any context other than high art," Katz said.
Sinatra's paintings would be characterized as "abstract expressionism" or New York school painting that was predominant after World War II, Katz said.
A print of a painting Katz had in his office looked like a mish-mash of circles and lines on a mustard-colored background.
"It (his painting) doesn't depict anything in our world," he said.
Katz said Sinatra's paintings fascinate him because it shows a convergence of high and low art.
"It sheds a lot of light on Sinatra's musical performance and his ambivalence about high art and pop culture," Katz said.
Katz's current art history classes do not include pop culture, and he hopes he will be able to create such a class in the future.
"It's a natural for a community college. It's the common ground," he said.
© 2001 UNION-NEWS.