Borscht Belt Brilliance: The Extraordinary Art of Morris Katz

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Eddy Portnoy: One Thursday, I was walking into the dining hall, and I saw a sign that said, "This Saturday, famous American artist Morris Katz, who is in the Guinness World Book of Records, will be painting in the dining hall," and I thought to myself, "Who is Morris Katz, famous American artist?" I've never heard of him. What I see is that he's painting these paintings using, like, a piece of metal and toilet paper, and as he's doing this, he's bantering with the audience. He's telling jokes. He's, you know, he's having a back and forth with people. He's sort of lightly making fun of them. He... they're making fun of him, and there was this really interesting rapport between him and the audience as he's doing these paintings, and at the end, he auctions all of them off, and people were really eager to buy them.

[00:00:49] Brett Barry: On today's "Kaatscast," the two-time Guinness record-holding "King of Schlock Art" and his frequent sojourns to the Catskills. Stay tuned for the incredible story of "Morris Katz: Master of Instant Art."

[00:01:06] Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is supported by... The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie Counties, including brands for the local region such as The Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com; and by Briars & Brambles Books, the go-to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily! For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call (518) 750-8599.

[00:01:48] Brett Barry: If you've never heard of Morris Katz, join the club. I only learned about him this year when an auction came up with one of his paintings. The item description read, "Acrylic on Board Painting" by Morris Katz (1932-2010), a Polish-American artist known as the world's fastest painter. The artwork depicts an autumn landscape. Impasto technique with the use of a palette knife titled "In the Catskills," signed by the artist and dated 1978 in the lower right. I placed a bid on that painting, and while I waited to see if I'd win it, my research began in earnest. Morris Katz was a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who moved to New York after the war and picked up, well, not a paintbrush but a palette knife and lots of toilet paper, and would go on to set two world records. One for completing a painting in the shortest amount of time, a 12 by 6 inch canvas of a child in the snow, painted in 30 seconds, and framed in 8 seconds, and his second as the world's most prolific artist, beating out Picasso with more than 280,000 pieces. Katz was also well-known for his vibrant performance art in the then-thriving Catskills Vacationland, known as the Borscht Belt. Earlier this year, New York City's YIVO Institute for Jewish Research hosted an exhibition of Katz's paintings. Eddy Portnoy is YIVO's Director of Exhibitions.

[00:03:27] Eddy Portnoy: My name is Eddy Portnoy. I work at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The YIVO is a Jewish historical research institute. It was founded in Vilna, Poland, in 1925. Vilna, Poland, is now Vilnius, Lithuania, and the YIVO was created by a group of Jewish scholars who felt that a lot of Jewish culture, its folklore, its music, its literature, all kinds of aspects of the culture were disappearing because of modernization and urbanization, and so they decided to create an organization that would collect oral histories, physical objects, books, periodicals, theater posters, costumes, scripts, correspondence, and manuscripts of Yiddish writers, and it sort of transformed into a kind of Library of Congress/Smithsonian Institute of Eastern European Jewry, and so it is now part of the Center for Jewish History, which is an umbrella organization for five different Jewish historical organizations among them: YIVO, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Leo Beck Institute, which focuses on German Jewry, the American Sephardi Federation, and the Yeshiva University Museum.

[00:04:45] Brett Barry: Tell me how you discovered Morris Katz and eventually how that led to an exhibit at your institution.

[00:04:53] Eddy Portnoy: Sure, so I came across Morris Katz serendipitously. I didn't grow up around New York. I grew up outside of Detroit. I never went to the Catskills as a kid. You know, I know that Morris was a Catskills staple, but I first came across him in Israel, where he also used to travel and perform, and so I was... in 1989, I was volunteering at a kibbutz. Every Saturday, they would have some sort of cultural event, and they would always announce it a few days before with a... some sort of sign on the dining hall, and one Thursday, I was walking into the dining hall, and I saw a sign that said, "This Saturday, famous American artist, Morris Katz." It's in the Guinness World Book of Records. We'll be painting in the dining hall, and I thought to myself, "Who is Morris Katz, famous American artist? I've never heard of him, you know, not that I was such a great expert on art at that age, but I never heard the name. It piqued my interest, and a few days later, I went to see what exactly this was, and when I got there, I saw an older man setting up about two dozen canvases on easels, and he began to explain to the audience that he learned to paint as a teenager in a DP camp in Germany, or Displaced Persons Camp, in Germany after World War II, and he continued this career after he moved to the United States. What I see is that he's painting these paintings using, like, a piece of metal and toilet paper, and he's creating totally passable landscapes and seascapes, and, you know, he's even doing, like, dancing Hasidim and clowns and all of these sort of characters, and as he's doing this, he's bantering with the audience. He's telling jokes. He's, you know, he's having a back-and-forth with people. He's making, you know, he's sort of lightly making fun of them. He... they're making fun of him, and there was this really interesting rapport between him and the audience as he's doing these paintings, and at the end, he auctions all of them off, and people were really eager to buy them, you know, which also kind of interested me because I didn't see them as great art or anything like that, but what I saw was that people were really interested in him, that he was this really affable, gregarious character, and that they weren't, you know, really buying the art. They were buying him and the experience of having... having seen him paint. It's an unusual experience, I think, to get to buy a piece of art that's still wet. That's not typical, you know, when you're buying art, so you know that was... that was kind of a neat aspect to it. Also, I guess because it was in Israel, like, part of, like, his banter was, like, in three languages: it was in English, it was in Yiddish, and it was in Hebrew, and that was also really kind of fascinating—the way he's able to kind of, you know, spin around and, you know, function in these... in these different languages and still be funny in all of them.

[00:07:44] Brett Barry: Did you meet him?

[00:07:45] Eddy Portnoy: Yeah, absolutely, yeah, I met him. I spoke Yiddish with him. That was... I wanted to, like, once I saw him, you know, once you saw Morris Katz, you wanted to meet him. You wanted to talk to him. He was this really outgoing, friendly, funny guy doing something really unique, so yeah, I, you know, after he was done, I approached him, and, you know, we spoke a bit, and so about six months after that, I moved to New York City, and I happened to be walking up 6th Avenue, and at about 8th Street, I looked up, and I saw this big yellow sign that said, "Morris Katz Art Gallery."

[00:08:20] Skip Stephenson: Greenwich Village in New York City, the art capital of America. This is where you'll find the one and only Morris Katz working furiously to maintain his reputation as the fastest artist in the world. He's also the only artist in the world who paints with toilet paper. Morris keeps track of his paintings like McDonald's keeps track of their hamburgers: more than 82,000 painted and sold so far.

[00:08:46] Eddy Portnoy: And then I started seeing him on, you know, public access cable. He had a show, you know, he'd be on Joe Franklin. You know, he was ubiquitous. Like the guy showed up at, you know, every art fair. He showed up at all kinds of charitable events performing this routine that he did. You know, what I discovered was he was sort of this, like, New York character and kind of a really interesting and unusual one at that.

[00:09:10] Brett Barry: Cut to your relationship with the... the curator of the Borscht Belt Museum.

[00:09:15] Eddy Portnoy: Right, so, you know, I moved to New York, I guess it was late 1989, and seeing, you know, Morris Katz in various places. I kind of forgot about it. I didn't really think about Morris Katz after that. Many years later, a little more than a year and a half ago, I got a phone call from a friend of mine. His name is Andrew Jacobs. He happens to be the president of the Borscht Belt Museum. He says, "Have you ever heard of Morris Katz?" I laughed and I told him the story. I just told you, and he said to me, "Well, someone approached us and asked if we wanted to do an exhibit of Morris Katz paintings at the Borscht Belt Museum," and I said, "Absolutely, you should do an exhibit of Morris Katz paintings at the Borscht Belt Museum." He was a standard there. Morris Katz, you know, did his routine at virtually every hotel in the Borscht Belt. Thousands of people saw him do it. Thousands of people bought his paintings there. He was sort of a classic Borscht Belt character. You should do an exhibit of his work. After that, the person who loaned them the paintings for that exhibit approached me as "Director of Exhibitions at YIVO" and asked if we would do an exhibition here, and I said, "Sure, why not?" YIVO has some Morris Katz paintings in its collection. Additionally, we have people on staff, and these are younger people who are in their 30s who love Morris Katz, and I found this really intriguing. They love Morris Katz because their grandparents had Morris Katz paintings on their walls, and they inherited them. Actually, they have this sort of emotional attachment to these paintings because there's a connection to their grandparents and maybe the times they spent in the Catskills as little kids, so it became this sort of multi-generational thing, and so, you know, we did this exhibit. It opened last May, and one of the really interesting things that happened at the opening... dozens of people came up to me and other people who work at YIVO and began to tell us their stories of seeing Morris Katz in the Catskills, and so we decided, you know, that night to announce a second Morris Katz event that would only be on Zoom, but we invited people to come on, you know, a Zoom session to talk about, you know, Morris Katz, and it was really fascinating. People had a lot to say about, you know, seeing this guy and buying his paintings and having had them on their walls for 20, 30, 40 years, so it became this sort of really meaningful trip into Borscht Belt nostalgia.

[00:11:49] Morris Katz: Well, as a rule in my studio, this would sell $350. $60, I'm asking... an opening bid [frame is included... this original painting]. Oh, a thing in the back, thank you, sir. Alright, we got 60 ready. I'm looking for a higher bid. 70, that's it. 80 from the back, don't wait so long. You're almost lost on this one. 80 once. 80 going twice. Last call. Sold $80. Come out, give a nice round of applause. All the way, a newcomer came in with some fresh energy. Come up front from the back. Folks, cheer him up for the cashier.

[00:12:35] Eddy Portnoy: You know, it's a different aspect of performance in the Catskills hotels that people seem to have forgotten. Memories of having gone to these hotels—their memories—they're in your head, but when you saw Morris Katz paint a painting and then you bought the painting, and it's been on your wall for so long, it's sort of an avatar of those memories that you can really bring out in different ways, you know, especially if you saw him paint it.

[00:13:00] Brett Barry: Yeah, it beats bringing a matchbook home from the... from the restaurant.

[00:13:05] Eddy Portnoy: Right, yeah, I mean, right. Exactly, it's like... it's... it's, you know, it's like an... plus it's an original work of art. You know, most people don't buy original works of art because, you know, the cost is prohibitive, and this was kind of like art for the people, you know, by the people, and it was really... it's really kind of a unique experience.

[00:13:25] Brett Barry: So it was art for the people. Was he recognized by the art world?

[00:13:29] Eddy Portnoy: Not at all. I don't think Morris Katz ever had a gallery show or an exhibition, you know, outside of something he did on his own in New York or elsewhere. His art was considered kitschy, schlocky, and certainly some of it was. Morris Katz, incidentally, did have a lot of artistic talent, but when he's doing his, like, speed painting, when he's doing his instant art, it's instant art. You know, the details aren't as sharp or not even close to being as sharp as they could be, but I've seen Morris Katz paintings. He did a whole series of the U.S. presidents that are quite good that he did. There are all kinds of things that he did that are not in the realm of his style of instant art.

[00:14:08] Brett Barry: He wasn't painting the President Collection with toilet paper and a palette knife. He was using a brush for those.

[00:14:12] Eddy Portnoy: No, no, he would know he was, yeah, he was using a brush, and they're quite well done.

[00:14:17] Brett Barry: The toilet paper palette knife technique—was there an artistic reason for that, or was that part of the show?

[00:14:22] Eddy Portnoy: No, there was an artistic reason for that. In his book, "Paint Good & Fast," he describes the way in which he developed the instant art style, and it had to do with him mixing paints using a palette knife, and what he did was he got tired of mixing the paint, so he dipped his palette knife into the paint can and threw paint on the canvas and then started to, you know, smear it around, and then later on, he started using toilet paper to create different details like leaves on trees or, you know, rocks on beaches and things like that. He wound up creating the entire painting using just a palette knife and toilet paper.

[00:15:05] Skip Stephenson: I decided to see for myself how the king of the volume art business works his magic, and so, off to the village for a visit with the man who discovered a gold mine in his bathroom.

[00:15:17] Brett Barry: This clip and the two before it are from a 1979 episode of "Real People" with reporter Skip Stephenson.

[00:15:24] Morris Katz: Well, the price of that paper's going up, too, isn't it? In my case, I'm blessed because I use hot toilet paper. I steal it from the hotel.

[00:15:31] Skip Stephenson: You steal it from the hotel?

[00:15:32] Morris Katz: Yeah, I wipe them out in a few sheets. Sure, here's Nebraska, the mountaintops of Nebraska.

[00:15:38] Skip Stephenson: Okay, wait a minute, the mountaintops of Nebraska?

[00:15:42] Morris Katz: Yeah, I mean the lower bottoms of the tops.

[00:15:43] Skip Stephenson: That's gonna be a surprise to the people back in Nebraska.

[00:15:46] Morris Katz: Alright, look, let me show you how quickly trees, leaves, and trees could be down here. This is called cautiously applied and sophisticatedly expressed. I get signals from the top, you know, here, the whole thing. Look at this. It's called custom framing now. It's called custom overhead framing because the equipment's being put over the head. You know it is like a pizza pie. It's a Polish pizza pie.

[00:16:07] Skip Stephenson: How much would you charge a tall, blonde guy from the cornfields of Nebraska who's here in New York in the sophisticated city of New York? I'd probably, what? A thousand dollars? I wouldn't know any different.

[00:16:15] Morris Katz: From Nebraska, I tell you what, from Nebraska, I'm gonna sell to you right now, $8 for the whole thing.

[00:16:20] Skip Stephenson: $8.

[00:16:21] Morris Katz: Yeah.

[00:16:22] Skip Stephenson: Well, if this guy could sell me a painting of Nebraska with mountains in it, he could sell anybody anything, and he does. After a week of painting furiously, Morris schleps his inventory and his act north to art shows in the Catskills, where he sells them all.

[00:16:38] Brett Barry: So he was called "the king of schlock art," and it was called instant art. How would you characterize the art itself?

[00:16:45] Eddy Portnoy: I wouldn't say it's high-quality art. I mean, the real reason for the Morris Katz exhibit is not the art itself. It's Morris Katz. The way that he, you know, created the style, the way that he created an audience for it. He was really a true performance artist. You know, before performance art really existed, and the art is really the product of him and his character that he created, you know, one of the odd and interesting things about Jewish Catskills hotels is the entertainment component. Even from the very beginning, from the early 20th century, you find that Jews staying in the Catskills needed entertainment in a way that other ethnicities didn't or maybe didn't necessarily care that much about it. You know, you find Yiddish theater actors going up there and performing. The need for entertainment was almost overwhelming to the point where you see this sort of network of hotels created, you know, by the time the Jews become middle class and more. You know, these hotels like Grossinger's or Kutsher's wind up developing these, like, major entertainment complexes that also served as feeders for the film and television industry in a way that rivaled Broadway. It's so... it's actually kind of weird that Jews required entertainment more than other people. It's bizarre. Sometimes I've said that, you know, the Jews who came from, you know, raucous neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, where there were street performers and, you know, there were more nickelodeons on the Lower East Side than in any other neighborhood in New York City. There were tons of Yiddish theaters. You know, there's entertainment on every corner. It's almost as if, like, the sort of serenity of the Catskills was too much to handle, and they needed to bring the noise.

[00:18:40] Brett Barry: And Morris Katz brought some of that noise?

[00:18:42] Eddy Portnoy: He certainly did.

[00:18:44] Brett Barry: Stay tuned for our climactic conclusion to see what happened to the painting I placed that bid on [and] that set this whole story in motion, right after this...

[00:18:56] Campbell Brown: This episode is proudly sponsored by Ulster Savings Bank. Stop in and meet the friendly staff at their Phoenicia and Woodstock locations. Call (866) 440-0391 or visit them at ulstersavings.com. Member FDIC. Equal Housing Lender.

[00:19:13] Brett Barry: Okay, so on July 20, 2024, 46 years after Morris Katz painted an autumnal Catskills scene with what I expect was extraordinary speed and a few wads of toilet paper, I took that painting home with a winning bid of $70. I called my friends at Geoff Rogers Picture Framing in Pine Hill because, of course, Morris Katz didn't use a standard size board, and Geoff's son Seth set me up with a custom frame [same day].

[00:19:43] Geoff Rogers: This is Morris Katz.

[00:19:44] Brett Barry: This is Morris Katz.

[00:19:46] Geoff Rogers: What is it, 18 20?

[00:19:48] Brett Barry: 18 20.

[00:19:48] Geoff Rogers: 18 20. You know, a simple black frame in-stock. I'll show you what... what that would be.

[00:19:55] Brett Barry: Okay.

[00:19:56] Geoff Rogers: Here's our standard in-stock black frame: $60.

[00:20:00] Brett Barry: That's nice.

[00:20:01] Geoff Rogers: Yeah.

[00:20:02] Brett Barry: Geoff sold me on a classic black gallery frame, and Seth got to work—measuring, cutting, gluing, joining, and finishing—a gorgeous frame for, honestly, a really nice painting. I sent a picture to YIVO's Eddy Portnoy to get his take on it.

[00:20:21] Eddy Portnoy: Here, let me look at... yeah, this is... this is basically the style. This is great, though. It's, you know, a little house in the woods, you know, with nice... nicely colored trees. It's a fall scene. This would have fit quite well into the exhibit.

[00:20:34] Brett Barry: Check out our show notes for a link to YIVO's video on "Memories of Morris Katz," and be sure you're subscribed to our newsletter to see pictures of my very own Morris Katz painting. If you'd like one of your own, remember he made more than a quarter of a million of them, so it shouldn't be too difficult to track one down, and I'm sure Geoff and Seth will be happy to frame it for you. I'll add a link to their shop in Pine Hill. Clips provided by George Schlatter Productions. "Kaatscast" is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio. Production Intern: Olivia Sippel, Transcriptionist: Jerome Kazlauskas, Announcements by Campbell Brown. Sign up for our newsletter at kaatscast.com, and please be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: "rate and review" so more people can find us and follow us on Instagram [@kaatscast]. Join us next time for an in-depth profile of a misunderstood Catskill rodent with the world's top expert on said rodent. Until then, I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening.