Alex Katz
Encyclopedia
Alex Katz is an American
figurative art
ist associated with the Pop art
movement. In particular, he is known for his painting
s, sculpture
s, and prints
and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.
, New York
. In 1928 the family moved to St. Albans, Queens
. From 1946 to 1949 he studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine
. Skowhegan exposed him to painting from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today. Katz explains that Skowhegan’s plein air painting gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting.” 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 [he] can think.” His works seem simple, but according to Katz they are more reductive
, which is fitting to his personality.
Ada Katz
, whom he married in 1958, has been the subject of numerous portraits throughout his career. In 1960, Katz had his first (and only) son, Vincent Katz. A summer resident of Lincolnville, Maine
since 1954, he has developed a close relationship with local Colby College
. The college presented him with an honorary doctorate in 1984 and in October 1996, the Colby College Museum of Art opened a wing dedicated to Katz that features more than 400 oil paintings, collage
s, and prints donated by the artist.
His first one-person show came in 1954: an exhibition of paintings at the Roko Gallery in New York. In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. In 1965, he also embarked on a prolific career in printmaking
. Katz would go on to produce 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 print oeuvre. A print catalogue raisonné
is due for release by the Albertina in the fall of 2011.
Beginning in the late 1950s, Katz developed a technique of painting on cut panels, first of wood, then aluminum, calling them "cutouts". These works would occupy space like sculptures, but their physicality is compressed into planes, as with paintings.
After 1964, Katz increasingly portrayed groups of figures. He would continue 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. In 1974 The Whitney Museum of American Art
showed Alex Katz Prints, followed by a traveling retrospective exhibition of paintings and cutouts titled Alex Katz in 1986. After the Whitney exhibition, Katz focused on landscapes stating "I wanted to make an environmental landscape, where you were IN it." 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.
Katz has collaborated with poets and writers since the 1960s, producing several notable editions such as "Face of the Poet" combining his images with poetry from his circle, such as Ted Berrigan
, Ann Lauterbach
, Carter Ratcliff, and Gerard Malanga
. He has worked with the poet John Ashbery
, creating publications entitled "Fragment" in 1966 and "Coma Berenices". in 2005. He has worked with Vincent Katz on "A Tremor in the Morning" and "Swimming Home". Katz also made 25 etchings for the Arion Press edition of Gloria with 28 poems by Bill Berkson
. Other collaborators include Robert Creely, with whom he produced "Edges" and "Legeia: A Libretto". and Kenneth Koch
, producing "Interlocking Lives".
Katz has received numerous accolades throughout his career. In 2007, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy Museum, New York. In 2005, Katz was the honored artist at the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Inaugural Richard Gray Annual Visual Arts Series. The same year, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Colgate University
, Hamilton, New York— his second Honorary Doctorate, following one from Colby College, Maine, in 1984. Katz was named the Philip Morris Distinguished Artist at the American Academy in Berlin
in 2001 and received the Cooper Union Annual Artist of the City Award in 2000. In addition to this honor, in 1994 Cooper Union
Art School created the Alex Katz Visiting Chair in Painting with an endowment provided by the sale of ten paintings donated by the artist. Katz was inducted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988. In 1987 he was the recipient of the Pratt Institute’s
Mary Buckley Award for achievement and also received the Queens Museum of Art Award for Lifetime Achievement. The Chicago Bar Association
honored Katz with the Award for Art in Public Places in 1985. In 1978, Katz received the U.S. Government grant to participate in an educational and cultural exchange with the USSR. Katz was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
for Painting in 1972.
Numerous publications outline Katz's career's many facets: from Alex Katz in Maine published by the Farnsworth Art Museum
to the catalogue Alex Katz New York, published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art
. Alex Katz Seeing Drawing, Making, 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 of the canvas. Phaidon Press
(2005) 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, showing that he is now considered a major reference for younger painters and artists. Over the years, Francesco Clemente
, Enzo Cucchi
, Liam Gillick
, Peter Halley
, David Salle
and Richard Prince
have written essays about his work or conducted interviews with him.
In 1996, Vincent Katz and Vivien Bittencourt produced a video titled Alex Katz: Five Hours, documenting the production of his painting January 3. and in 2008 he was the subject of a documentary directed by Heinz Peter Schwerfel, entitled What About Style? Alex Katz: a Painter's Painter.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
figurative art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
ist associated with the Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
movement. In particular, he is known for his painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
s, sculpture
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
s, and prints
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...
and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.
Life and work
Alex Katz was born in BrooklynBrooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
. In 1928 the family moved to St. Albans, Queens
St. Albans, Queens
St. Albans is a middle class community in the New York City borough of Queens around the intersection of Linden Boulevard and Farmers Boulevard, about two miles north of JFK Airport. It is southeast of Jamaica, west of Cambria Heights and north of Springfield Gardens and Laurelton.The neighborhood...
. From 1946 to 1949 he studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine
Maine
Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, New Hampshire to the west, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is both the northernmost and easternmost...
. Skowhegan exposed him to painting from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today. Katz explains that Skowhegan’s plein air painting gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting.” 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 [he] can think.” His works seem simple, but according to Katz they are more reductive
Reduction (philosophy)
In philosophy, reduction is the process by which one object, property, concept, theory, etc., is shown to be explicable in terms of another, lower level, entity...
, which is fitting to his personality.
Ada Katz
Ada Katz
Ada Del Moro Katz is the wife and model of Alex Katz.-Life:She graduated from Brooklyn College with a BS in 1950. She studied at the University of Maryland, and graduated from New York University with an MS in biology in 1955. She worked at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center...
, whom he married in 1958, has been the subject of numerous portraits throughout his career. In 1960, Katz had his first (and only) son, Vincent Katz. A summer resident of Lincolnville, Maine
Lincolnville, Maine
Lincolnville is a town in Waldo County, Maine, United States. The population was 2,042 at the 2000 census. Lincolnville is the mainland terminal for state ferry service to Islesboro.-History:...
since 1954, he has developed a close relationship with local Colby College
Colby College
Colby College is a private liberal arts college located on Mayflower Hill in Waterville, Maine. Founded in 1813, it is the 12th-oldest independent liberal arts college in the United States...
. The college presented him with an honorary doctorate in 1984 and in October 1996, the Colby College Museum of Art opened a wing dedicated to Katz that features more than 400 oil paintings, collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
s, and prints donated by the artist.
His first one-person show came in 1954: an exhibition of paintings at the Roko Gallery in New York. In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. In 1965, he also embarked on a prolific career in printmaking
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...
. Katz would go on to produce many editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and linoleum cut, producing over 400 print editions in his lifetime. The Albertina
Albertina
The Albertina is a museum in Vienna, Austria, containing the world's best collection of old master prints and drawings.Albertina, a feminine adjectival form of Albert , may also refer to:...
, Vienna, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the largest museums in the United States, attracting over one million visitors a year. It contains over 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas...
, hold complete collections of Katz print oeuvre. A print catalogue raisonné
Catalogue raisonné
The typical catalogue raisonné is a monograph giving a comprehensive catalogue of artworks by an artist.The essential elements of a catalogue raisonné are that it purports to be an exhaustive list of works for a defined subject matter describing the works in a way so that they may be reliably...
is due for release by the Albertina in the fall of 2011.
Beginning in the late 1950s, Katz developed a technique of painting on cut panels, first of wood, then aluminum, calling them "cutouts". These works would occupy space like sculptures, but their physicality is compressed into planes, as with paintings.
After 1964, Katz increasingly portrayed groups of figures. He would continue 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. In 1974 The Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
showed Alex Katz Prints, followed by a traveling retrospective exhibition of paintings and cutouts titled Alex Katz in 1986. After the Whitney exhibition, Katz focused on landscapes stating "I wanted to make an environmental landscape, where you were IN it." In the late 1980s, Katz took on a new subject in his work: fashion models in designer clothing, including Kate Moss
Kate Moss
Kate Moss is an English model. Moss is known for her waifish figure and popularising the heroin chic look in the 1990s. She is also known for her controversial private life, high profile relationships, party lifestyle, and drug use. Moss changed the look of modelling and started a global debate on...
and Christy Turlington
Christy Turlington
Christy Turlington Burns is an American model best known for representing Calvin Klein from 1987 to 2007. She has worked on dozens of modeling contracts with companies including Maybelline Cosmetics and Versace. Turlington starred in her fashion documentary Catwalk and Isaac Mizrahi's Unzipped...
. "I've always been interested in fashion because it's ephemeral," he said.
Katz has collaborated with poets and writers since the 1960s, producing several notable editions such as "Face of the Poet" combining his images with poetry from his circle, such as Ted Berrigan
Ted Berrigan
-Early life:Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at Providence College before joining the U.S. Army in 1954 to serve in the Korean War. After three years in the Army, he finished his college studies at the University of Tulsa in...
, Ann Lauterbach
Ann Lauterbach
Ann Lauterbach is an American poet, essayist, and professor. Her most recent poetry collection is Or to Begin Again , a 2009 National Book Award finalist. Her other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the John D. and Catherine C. MacArthur...
, Carter Ratcliff, and Gerard Malanga
Gerard Malanga
Gerard Joseph Malanga is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, curator and archivist.-Early life:Born in the Bronx, New York, Malanga graduated from the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan and attended Wagner College on Staten Island...
. He has worked with the poet John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
, creating publications entitled "Fragment" in 1966 and "Coma Berenices". in 2005. He has worked with Vincent Katz on "A Tremor in the Morning" and "Swimming Home". Katz also made 25 etchings for the Arion Press edition of Gloria with 28 poems by Bill Berkson
Bill Berkson
Bill Berkson is an American poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who has been active in the art and literary worlds since his early twenties.-Life:Born in New York on August 30, 1939, Bill Berkson grew up on Manhattan’s Upper...
. Other collaborators include Robert Creely, with whom he produced "Edges" and "Legeia: A Libretto". and Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77...
, producing "Interlocking Lives".
Katz has received numerous accolades throughout his career. In 2007, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy Museum, New York. In 2005, Katz was the honored artist at the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Inaugural Richard Gray Annual Visual Arts Series. The same year, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Colgate University
Colgate University
Colgate University is a private liberal arts college in Hamilton, New York, USA. The school was founded in 1819 as a Baptist seminary and later became non-denominational. It is named for the Colgate family who greatly contributed to the university's endowment in the 19th century.Colgate has 52...
, Hamilton, New York— his second Honorary Doctorate, following one from Colby College, Maine, in 1984. Katz was named the Philip Morris Distinguished Artist at the American Academy in Berlin
American Academy in Berlin
The American Academy in Berlin is a research and cultural institution in Berlin whose stated mission is to foster a greater understanding and dialogue between the people of the United States and the people of Germany.The American Academy was founded in September 1994 by a group of prominent...
in 2001 and received the Cooper Union Annual Artist of the City Award in 2000. In addition to this honor, in 1994 Cooper Union
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly referred to simply as Cooper Union, is a privately funded college in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States, located at Cooper Square and Astor Place...
Art School created the Alex Katz Visiting Chair in Painting with an endowment provided by the sale of ten paintings donated by the artist. Katz was inducted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988. In 1987 he was the recipient of the Pratt Institute’s
Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute is a private art college in New York City located in Brooklyn, New York, with satellite campuses in Manhattan and Utica. Pratt is one of the leading undergraduate art schools in the United States and offers programs in Architecture, Graphic Design, History of Art and Design,...
Mary Buckley Award for achievement and also received the Queens Museum of Art Award for Lifetime Achievement. The Chicago Bar Association
Chicago Bar Association
Founded in 1874, the Chicago Bar Association is a voluntary bar association with over 20,000 members. Like other bar associations, it concerns itself with professional ethics, networking among members, and continuing legal education. It is located adjacent to the John Marshall Law School in the...
honored Katz with the Award for Art in Public Places in 1985. In 1978, Katz received the U.S. Government grant to participate in an educational and cultural exchange with the USSR. Katz was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
for Painting in 1972.
Numerous publications outline Katz's career's many facets: from Alex Katz in Maine published by the Farnsworth Art Museum
Farnsworth Art Museum
The Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, United States, is an art museum that specializes in American art. Its permanent collection includes works by such artists as Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, Thomas Eakins, Eastman Johnson, Fitz Henry Lane, Frank Benson, Childe Hassam, and Maurice...
to the catalogue Alex Katz New York, published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art
Irish Museum of Modern Art
The Irish Museum of Modern Art also known as IMMA, is Ireland's leading national institution exhibiting and collecting modern and contemporary art. The museum opened in May 1991 and is located in Royal Hospital Kilmainham, a 17th-century building near Heuston Station to the west of Dublin's city...
. Alex Katz Seeing Drawing, Making, 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 of the canvas. Phaidon Press
Phaidon Press
Phaidon Press is a British publisher of books on the visual arts, including art, architecture, photography, and design worldwide.As of 2009, Phaidon's headquarters are in London, UK, though they were in Oxford for many years, with offices in New York City, Paris, Berlin, Milan, and Tokyo...
(2005) published an illustrated survey, Alex Katz by Carter Ratcliff, Robert Storr
Robert Storr
-Education:Robert Storr received his B.A. in History and French from Swarthmore College in 1972, and earned an M.F.A. in Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978.-Career:...
and Iwona Blazwick
Iwona Blazwick
Iwona Blazwick OBE is director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.-Life and career:Iwona Blazwick was brought up by her architect parents in Blackheath, South East London...
. In 1989, a special edition of Parkett
Parkett
-Publication:Published three times per year in English and German by its publishing house in Zurich, Switzerland, with an additional editorial office in New York, Parkett has a circulation of 12,000 and is read by some 30,000 readers in 40 countries, one third of them in North...
was devoted to Katz, showing that he is now considered a major reference for younger painters and artists. Over the years, Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente is an Italian and American contemporary artist. Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti, the art of Francesco Clemente is inclusive and nomadic, crossing many borders, intellectual and geographical.Dividing his time...
, Enzo Cucchi
Enzo Cucchi
Enzo Cucchi is an Italian painter. A native of Morro d'Alba, province of Ancona, he was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with fellow countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Sandro Chia...
, Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick is a British conceptual artist who lives in New York City. He is often associated with the artists included the 1996 exhibit Traffic, which first introduced the term Relational Art.-Life and career:...
, Peter Halley
Peter Halley
-Early Life and Career:Halley first came to prominence as a result of the geometric paintings rendered in intense day-glo colours that he produced in the early 1980s. His practice as an artist is usually associated with minimalism, neo-geo, and neo-conceptualism...
, David Salle
David Salle
David Salle is an American painter who helped define postmodern sensibility by combining figuration with a varied pictorial language of multi-imagery...
and Richard Prince
Richard Prince
Richard Prince is an American painter and photographer. Prince began appropriating photographs in 1975...
have written essays about his work or conducted interviews with him.
In 1996, Vincent Katz and Vivien Bittencourt produced a video titled Alex Katz: Five Hours, documenting the production of his painting January 3. and in 2008 he was the subject of a documentary directed by Heinz Peter Schwerfel, entitled What About Style? Alex Katz: a Painter's Painter.
External links
- Alex Katz interviewed by Richard Prince
- Alex Katz Collection at the Colby College Museum of ArtColby College Museum of ArtFounded in 1959, the Colby College Museum of Art now comprises four wings, more than 6,000 works, and more than of exhibition space. The Museum's permanent collection specializes in American and contemporary art...
- Biography on Magical-Secrets.com
- Artist Alex Katz Featured in J.Crew Catalog
- "Ada with Sunglasses" tapestry by Alex Katz