It was there that she met her husband Charles Janoff, who was a successful music publisher and song promoter. Janoff went on to represent many prominent writers whose songs were well known American standards, in Broadway musicals and on the radio. They were married in 1947. Years later, Katjanelson stated that her prints were “motivated by an impulse to record sound patterns”, and that the grid format provided “inevitable solutions for each sound”. Her interest in visualizing sound alludes to influences she absorbed from both her father and her husband.

The Janoffs had two children. Jaine was born in 1950, Peter six years later. But motherhood does not seem to have slowed Katjanelson’s relentless drive. Jaine remembers her mother using any spare moment to work in her darkroom, while she was at school, or after the children’s bedtime. Peter recalls witnessing his mother directing her first film and how impressed he was by her remarkable command of the new medium. A feminist without assuming the title, one perceives Katjanelson as a woman who tried to do it all.

From 1957 to 1960, Katjanelson co-directed the Workshop Gallery in mid-town New York City with fellow artist Constance Kane. In a recent telephone conversation with this author, Kane remembered Katjanelson as “fearless…she could do anything”. Among the then-emerging artists the two women exhibited were Jules Olitski, Ralph Humphrey, Philip Pearlstein and Jack Tworkov, all future modernist masters. This accomplishment is especially impressive when one realizes that Katjanelson had not yet begun her academic career. She received her BA in film at Hunter College in 1974, when she was fifty-two years of age. Soon thereafter, she exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, the School for Social Research, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Art in Embassies program.

PROJECT DNBAMany of Katjanelson’s notes refer to her MFA thesis project: “An Examination of the Indexical Configuration as an Art Work Using Monitoring of Air Pollution as One Hypostatic Source”. The work was part experiment, part activism. Katjanelson (then Janoff) stamped two hundred white flags with the acronym DNBA, (Do Not Breathe Air) and a serial number. She left each flag at a different New York City location for two weeks, photographing them when they were pristine, and again upon their retrieval. This systematic test of the effects of urban soot and vehicle emissions on the environment was ahead of the conservation movement curve. As she followed up on the data she collected, she pursued sophisticated scientific ideas that supported the integration of bureaucratic systems with her conceptual thesis. Reading Heidegger, Katjanelson dwells on “stereo chemistry” - the study of spatial relationships of particles that compose a compound. Her notes include her examination of the structure of hydrocarbons and the invisible damage the atmosphere was inflicting on humanity. While these notations inform her thesis project, her preoccupation with the unseen structure of the material world was deep and sustained.

Vincent Longo was Katjanelson’s MFA thesis advisor at Hunter College. Whether this association was serendipitous or designed, it was well timed. Katjanelson’s priorities were perfectly aligned with Longo’s aesthetics. A master printmaker, Longo was a professor at Hunter from 1967 to 2001. Longo arrived at abstraction through his study of the meditative qualities of the mandala, Jung’s writings on symbolism and creation myths, and Taoism. He stated that his overarching interest was in “archetypal patterns and habits of design that seem to project or fortify inner-directed matter and feeling”, an ethos that reinforced Katjanelson’s interest in binary ideas.

Katjanelson’s prints are often unsigned and undated. It is, therefore, sometimes difficult to ascribe a definite chronology to her many lithographic and off-set photographic series. She was particularly prolific, if not obsessive in her production of grid-based prints. Like Longo, she was concerned with the idea of entropy. She states: “The image that is first used to record the recurrent beat of some barely audible wasp wing [is] replaced by a complete disinterest in content. …I had to find an image that would allow my eyes to rest, to settle and be transfixed.” Both Longo and Katjanelson used a grid structure that radiates from the center rather than the edge, and thus implies expansion. Her constellations of dots are not simply symmetrical patterns. She also instills a quietly human aspect to the regularized field through her use of marks that are often slightly gestural, and thus a bit unpredictable.

Like Longo, Katjanelson sought a balance between disintegration and equilibrium. The viewer scans what is expected to be a regularized pattern, but hesitates when confronted with the irregularities of touch. The resulting tension between these opposing systems renders a kind of nervous energy. The eye assumes regularity, but is met with minute adjustments of color and rhythm. It is the interstices between the mark and the field that concern Katjanelson most.

The visual activity occurs just below the surface of the page and just above the pattern, like a tiny, subtle dance of mutating dots on a limitless field. Katjanelson’s grid prints multiplied exponentially. She experimented again and again, making slight changes in the color of the ground, the quality of the marks, and the proportions of the schema, creating hundreds of variations. The artist wrote about her visceral reaction to making her grid lithographs:

The tension set up between each dot in symmetrical arrangements is magnetic, compelling my eyes to fix upon one cluster of dots or another. It was difficult to pull my eyes away after being rooted in an area for an hour or so. As each image became more densely populated by addition of opposing grid systems, disintegration set in. The equilibrium was upset and a chaos was the ultimate end.

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Tick of the Death
Water Beetle

Aquatint etching, 1975

15 5/8 x 15 3/4 inches

Signed: Katjanelson

One of Katjanelson’s print series enlarges the dot/grid dynamic by using lively and colorful polka dots in various proportions, some of which forsake the grid entirely, giving us a swarm of near-colliding orbs. Katjanelson also used the target theme, an image that appears many times in history of modern art, (Jasper Johns and Robert Indiana immediately come to mind), but in her hands the iconic form becomes a study of texture and contrast.

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Other print suites reveal the artist’s irreverence and sense of humor, such as one group of offset photographic images rendering nylon stockings and undershirts as semi-transparent veils of color that float like apparitions. The underthings are exposed, but any allusion to intimacy is nullified by the casual, disembodied arrangements. Katjanelson’s wit is also apparent in a print series that organizes the fundamental dots around simple words and their anagrams, such as OH and HO or AH and HA. These works and archival photos of the artist reveal her playful spirit and her ability to balance the serious issues of her work with a healthy appreciation of the absurd.

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1973-74, 24 x 19 inches

Over time, Katjanelson’s allegiance to the grid gives way to more relaxed imagery. Perhaps taking Andy Warhol’s lead, she used topical press images like the Beatles in the 1960s, or she rendered lips and eyes as pop objects. Other figuration appears as a series of self-portraits or studies of trees. The flat surface is sometimes sacrificed to Chine collé, or it is activated as a relief by the application of collaged bottle caps. All these variations of prints speak to Katjanelson’s relentless curiosity and her willingness to work with a wide variety of art applications. She seems uninhibited in her experimentation, willing to try, willing to stumble. Adept at Minimalism, Op, Pop, Conceptualism, photography and film as well as printmaking, art exercised her active mind.

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“Said the Quarks to the Hadron” series, aquatint etching, c. 1975, 22 x 30 inches

Oil on canvas with metal bottle caps

24 x 25 inches