Alex Katz (born July 24, 1927) is an American figurative artist known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints. Since 1951, Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. He is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colors are considered as precursors to Pop Art.
Early life and career Alex Katz was born on July 24, 1927, to a Jewish familySnider, Suzanne, "Why do Alex Katz's elegant canvases strike critics as the ultimate in WASP art?", Tablet, A New Read on Jewish Life, November 21, 2006. in Brooklyn, New York, the son of an émigré who had lost a factory he owned in Ukraine, Odesa.Cathleen McGuigan (August 2009), Alex Katz Is Cooler Than Ever Smithsonian Magazine. In 1928, the family moved to St. Albans, Queens, where Katz grew up.ALEX KATZ: Selections from the Whitney Museum of American Art, June 29 - October 13, 2013. Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor.
From 1946 to 1949, Katz studied at the Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Skowhegan exposed him to painting from life, which proved pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today. Katz has said that Skowhegan's plein air painting gave him "a reason to devote my life to painting".Alex Katz. "Alex Katz". Phaidon, 2005. p. 210. Every year from early June to mid-September, Katz moves from his SoHo loft to a 19th-century clapboard farmhouse in Lincolnville, Maine.Grace Glueck (September 9, 2005), Clever Collages and Quiet Maine Scenes: Two Sides of Alex Katz The New York Times. A summer resident of Lincolnville since 1954, he has developed a close relationship with Colby College. From 1954 to 1960, he made a number of small collages of still lifes, Maine landscapes, and small figures. He met Ada Del Moro, who had studied biology at New York University, at a gallery opening in 1957. The two married on February 1, 1958. In 1960, Katz had his first (and only) son, Vincent Katz. Vincent Katz had two sons, Isaac and Oliver, who have been the subjects of Katz's paintings.
Katz has admitted to destroying a thousand paintings during his first ten years as a painter in order to find his style. Since the 1950s, he worked to create art more freely in the sense that he tried to paint "faster than I can think".Shama, Simon, Dave Hickey, Alanna Heiss. "Alex Katz Under the Stars: American Landscapes 1951–1995" (exh. cat.). New York: The Institute for Contemporary Art/ P. S. 1 Museum, 1996. His works seem simple, but according to Katz they are more reductive, which is fitting to his personality. "One thing I don't want to do is things already done. As for particular subject matter, I don't like narratives, basically."
Work Katz achieved public prominence in the 1980s.Alex Katz Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colors are now seen as precursors to Pop Art.Alex Katz, Lilies Against Yellow House (1983) National Galleries of Scotland.
Artistic style Katz's paintings are divided almost equally into portraiture and landscape. Since the 1960s he has painted views of New York (especially his immediate surroundings in Soho) and landscapes of Maine, where he spends several months every year, as well as portraits of family members, artists, writers and New York socialites.Alex Katz: FACE THE MUSIC, October 20 - November 19, 20119 Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris. His paintings are defined by their flatness of color and form, their economy of line, and their emotional detachment.Alex Katz, 19 May – 23 September 2012 Tate St Ives. A key source of inspiration is Kitagawa Utamaro's woodcuts.Alex Katz: Fashion and Studies, January 14 - February 14, 2009 Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris.
In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. Ada Katz, whom he married in 1958, has been the subject of more than 250Schwendener, Martha (August 29, 2013), "Overcoming the Orthodoxy of Abstraction", The New York Times. of his portraits. To make one of his large works, Katz paints a small oil sketch of a subject on a masonite board; the sitting might take an hour and a half. He then makes a small, detailed drawing in pencil or charcoal, with the subject returning, perhaps, for the artist to make corrections. Katz next blows up the drawing into a "cartoon", sometimes using an overhead projector, and transfers it to an enormous canvas via "pouncing"—a Renaissance-era technique involving powdered pigment pushed through tiny perforations pricked into the cartoon to recreate the composition on the surface to be painted. Katz pre-mixes all his colors and gets his brushes ready. Then he paints the canvas— wide by high or even larger—in a session of six or seven hours.
Beginning in the late 1950s, Katz developed a technique of painting on cut panels, first of wood, then aluminum, calling them "cutouts". These works occupied space like sculptures, but their physicality is compressed into planes, as with paintings.Ratcliff, Carter, "Alex Katz, Cutouts" Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2003, p. 26. The later cutouts are attached to wide, U-shaped aluminum stands, with a flickering, cinematic presence enhanced by warm spotlights. Most are close-ups, showing either front-and-back views of the same figure's head or figures who regard each other from opposite edges of the stand.Rosenberg, Karen (February 13, 2014), "Alex Katz / Dara Friedman", The New York Times.
After 1964, Katz increasingly portrayed groups of figures. He continued painting these complex groups into the 1970s, portraying the social world of painters, poets, critics, and other colleagues that surrounded him. He began designing sets and costumes for choreographer Paul Taylor in the early 1960s, and he has painted many images of dancers throughout the years. One Flight Up (1968) consists of more than 30 portraits of some of the leading lights of New York's intelligentsia during the late 1960s, such as the poet John Ashbery, the art critic Irving Sandler, and the curator Henry Geldzahler, who championed Andy Warhol. Each portrait is painted using oils on both sides of a sliver of aluminum that has then been cut into the shape of the subject's head and shoulders. The silhouettes are arranged predominantly in four long rows on a plain metal table.
After his Whitney exhibition in 1974, Katz focused on landscapes, saying: "I wanted to make an environmental landscape where you were IN it."Katz, Alex (1997), "Invented Symbols", Cantz Verlag, p. 87. In the late 1980s, Katz took on a new subject in his work: fashion models in designer clothing, including Kate Moss and Christy Turlington. "I've always been interested in fashion because it's ephemeral", he said.
Printmaking In 1965, Katz also embarked on a prolific career in printmaking. He went on to make many editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and linoleum cut, producing over 400 print editions in his lifetime. The Albertina, Vienna, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, hold complete collections of Katz's print oeuvre. The Albertina released a print catalogue raisonné in 2011.
During his time as a visiting artist at the University of Pennsylvania, Katz approached Japanese artist and printmaker Hitoshi Nakazato, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Fine Art, to make a series of prints.
Public commissions
In 1977, Katz was asked to create a work to be produced in billboard format above Times Square, New York City. The work, at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue, consisted of a frieze comprising 23 portrait heads of women. Each portrait was high and based on a study Katz did from life. The billboard extended along two sides of the RKO General building and wrapped in three tiers above on a tower. In 1980, the U.S. General Services Administration's Art in Architecture Program commissioned Katz to create an oil-on-canvas mural in the new United States Attorney's Building at Foley Square, New York City. The mural, inside the Silvio V. Mollo Building at Cardinal Hayes Place & Park Row, is high by 20 feet wide. In 2005, Katz participated in a public art project titled "Paint in the City", commissioned by United Technologies Corporation and organized by Creative Time. Katz's work, Give Me Tomorrow, was tall and long on a billboard space above the Bowery Bar on the corner of the Bowery and East Fourth Street. It was hand-painted by sign painters and installed in 2005.
Collaborations
Katz has collaborated with poets and writers since the 1960s, producing several notable editions, including "Face of the Poet",Berrigan, Ted, et al. (Kenward Elmslie, John Godfrey, Ted Greenwald, Michael Lally, Ann Lauterbach, Gerard Malanga, Alice Notley, John Perreault, Carter Ratcliff, Rene Ricard, Peter Schjeldahl, Tony Towle, Bill Zavatsky) and Alex Katz. "Face of the Poet", New York: Brooke Alexander, Inc., NY, and Marlborough Graphics, 1978. combining his images with work by poets in his circle, among them Ted Berrigan, Ann Lauterbach, Carter Ratcliff, and Gerard Malanga. He worked with John Ashbery on the publications "Fragment"Ashbery, John, and Alex Katz, "Fragment" Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1966 in 1966 and "Coma Berenices"Ashbery, John, and Alex Katz, "Coma Berenices". Photogravure images by Alex Katz; with text by John Ashbery. Tampa: Graphicstudio, Institute for Research in Art, 2005. in 2005. He worked with Vincent Katz on "A Tremor in the Morning"Katz, Vincent, and Alex Katz, "A Tremor In The Morning", New York: Peter Blum Edition, 1986. and "Swimming Home".Katz, Vincent and Alex Katz, "Swimming Home", Photogravure images by Alex Katz with poem by Vincent Katz. Tampa: Graphicstudio/University of South Florida, 2011. Katz also made 25 etchings for the Arion Press edition of Gloria with 28 poems by Bill Berkson. Other collaborators include Robert Creeley, with whom he produced "Edges"Creeley, Robert, and Alex Katz, "Edges" New York: Peter Blum Edition, 1998.] and "Legeia: A Libretto",Creeley, Robert, "Ligeia: A Libretto". Set design sketch by Alex Katz. New York and Minneapolis: Granary Books; Hermetic Press, 1996. and Kenneth Koch ("Interlocking Lives").Koch, Kenneth, and Alex Katz (1970), "Interlocking Lives", New York: Kulchur Press. In 1962, Harper's Bazaar incorporated cutouts by Katz for a four-page fashion spread.
Numerous publications outline Katz's career's many facets: from Alex Katz in MaineSchwartz, Sanford and Vincent Katz. "Alex Katz in Maine". Milan, Italy and Rockland, Maine: Charta; The Farnsworth Art Museum, 2005. published by the Farnsworth Art Museum to the catalogue Alex Katz New YorkBonet, Juan Manuel. New York. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Museum of Modern art and Charta, 2007. published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Alex Katz Seeing Drawing, Making,Moos, David, and Kadee Robbins (2008), "Alex Katz Seeing Drawing Making", Windsor Press. published in 2008, describes Katz's multiple-stage process of first producing charcoal drawings, small oil studies, and large cartoons for placing the image on the canvas and the final painting. In 2005, Phaidon Press published an illustrated survey, Alex Katz, by Carter Ratcliff, Robert Storr and Iwona Blazwick. In 1989, a special edition of Parkett was devoted to Katz. www.parkettart.com Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Liam Gillick, Peter Halley, David Salle, and Richard Prince have written essays about his work or conducted interviews with him."Alex Katz: An American Way of Seeing". Sara Hilden Art Museum, Musee de Grenoble, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, 2009. p. 130.
Gallery of works