ALEX  KATZ

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(American, b. July 24, 1927) )

Portraiture is Alex Katz’s chosen mode of expression. He combines into his gigantic and colorful paintings both characteristics of abstraction and representation. Avoiding any modeling between the subject and the background,  Katz reinforces the two dimensionality of a painting. His use of color planes without any tonal variations displays a shallow visual space into his portraitures.

Katz, as leader of the new realism movement, primarily painted portraits of his second wife, Ada and of his son. Vincent. Since he married Ada in 1958 she became her model. He works from his studio in SoHo where they have been living since 1968.

The son of Russian immigrants, Alex Katz was born July 24, 1927 in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Queens. He began his art training in 1946 at Cooper Union in New York City, continuing in 1949 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Main where he will be later an art teacher. Katz also taught art at the New York Studio School of Visual Arts, Yale University and the Pratt Institute throughout the 1960s. He also made hand-carved frames and designed stage sets and costumes for the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto in 1960 and 1964.

Widely influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, most significantly Jackson Pollock, Katz's early 1950's subjects already included portraits. By 1954, he had his first one-person show in New York at the Roko Gallery. The following year he began making cut paper collages.

Introducing a more realistic quality in his paintings in the 1960's, he rejected his earlier fascination with Abstract Expressionism in favor of a more simple and emotionless style. Throughout the years, his paintings began more colorful using glossy and bright colors.

Katz’s works capture the light and atmosphere of a specific moment offering to the viewer "that immediate sensation you see before you focus." He transfers on his canvas his world perception, a contemporary vision. Influenced by the media, he introduced into his work visual clues that belong to advertising such as: large scale, intense flat colors plane, large faces and an absence of sentimentality. “Katz’s portraits look singugularly contemporary.

By making them Gargantuan, he calls to mind enormous billboards. His approach to the human figure is a novel one, for he works on a scale seldom seen in art but familiar enough in our everyday life. He does not simply re-create  commercial art, but uses its interpersonality as a contrast to the poignant intimacy imparted by his sitters .. The tension between Katz’s love of tradition and his response to what he sees about him underlines his painting.[1]”

Far from being empty or meaningless, his portraits synthesize influences and impulses that emerge from the contemporary world. Alex Katz said :  “I think of myself as a modern person and I want my painting to look that way.

Alex Katz
Plaid Shirt II - Brown
Screenprint in Colors
47 x 31
1981

I think of my paintings as a different from some others in that they derive a lot from modern paintings as well as from older paintings .. They are traditional because all painting belongs to the paintings before them, and they are modernistic because they are responsive to the immediate.[2]”

Katz's paintings with their unique style of "modern realism" have appeared in numerous museums throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Hiroshima City Museum in Hiroshima, Japan and The Tate Gallery in London, England. Most recently he had major exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, as well as The Arts Club of Chicago.

On October 11, 1996, the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, opened a new wing dedicated to the work of Alex Katz. The artist donated over 400 pieces to the Museum's collection, including major oil paintings, cutouts, collages, prints, and drawings. Katz was introduced to Colby in the 1950s and received an honorary doctorate from the College in 1984.[3]

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[1] Irving Sandler, “In the Art Galleries”, The New York Post, Februray 9^th, 1964

[2]Alex Katz, catalogue of exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, March 13th – June 15^th, 1986, Geneva, 1986

[3] http://www.alexkatz.com/film2.html

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