Alex Katz: Biography & Artwork

Alex
Katz

American artist Alex Katz is best known for his bright, large-scale portraits, combining a sense of intimacy with the more detached aesthetics of Pop Art. If you are looking to buy or sell a Katz original print or edition, browse artwork available from our network and enquire to speak to the team. We offer free and confidential valuations and market advice on any Katz print, with zero obligation to sell.

Biography

American artist Alex Katz is renowned for his large-scale portraits and figurative works, which combine the vivid, bright visuals of the developing Pop Art movement, with a real sense of intimacy. His work's bold colours, two-dimensional compositions, and scarce detail make them a precursor to Pop Art. And yet, throughout his career, Katz's work has touched a range of mediums and styles, from Impressionist painting to architectural sculpture.

Attending art school in the 1950s, Katz’s unique representational style developed when Abstract Expressionism was at its height. But Katz knew better than to follow the trends of the art world. Taught to paint from life at the Skowhegan for Painting and Sculpture, Katz created a visual language where tradition met innovation, where the stylised language of advertisement and television met portraiture and landscape. His lack of conformity to the trends of the art world and his vast array of works make him one of the most popular artists today.

Katz’s Portraiture and Rise to Fame

Since his first solo show in 1954, Katz’s popularity has never faded. It is estimated that Katz participated in more than 500 group shows and had over 200 solo exhibitions. To this day, Katz's artworks feature in the collections of the MoMA in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and the Tate Gallery in London.

Undoubtedly, his most recognisable and well-loved works are his portraits, particularly of his wife Ada, whom he painted in over 250 works. Katz’s predilection for portraiture betrays his love for the Old Masters and makes him a worthy companion and precursor of the likes of Andy Warhol and Julian Opie. Since the 1960s, Katz began painting on increasingly large surfaces. His most famous portrait of Ada and an iconic Alex Katz work, The Red Smile (1963), dominated by Ada’s profile against a uniform red background, is almost 10 feet wide, making it one of the largest portraits ever painted.

With Katz’s popular and institutional recognition, it is no surprise the artist also achieved considerable commercial success. In 2019, his Blue Umbrella I (1972) made the headlines as it reached over £3 million at auction, making it Katz’s most expensive work sold at auction. The painting, unsurprisingly a representation of Ada, testifies to how the artist has won the public’s affection through his deeply intimate yet revolutionary works.

The most prominent influences on Katz’s work are evident from observing his style. Elements of the work of Henri Matisse and the School of Paris, Pop Art, and even occasionally Abstract Expressionism (in his early works), can be seen.
In the early 1960s, Katz began to paint large-scale canvases, which often feature close-ups of his subject’s face, as in Upside Down Ada (1965), or Oona (2006). These are said to be influenced by images used in advertising and the dramatic crops of cinema, as modern media typically has a large part to play in Katz’s work, leading to comparisons to many contemporary Pop Artists. Katz’s rejection of Abstract Expressionism mirrors that of Andy Warhol, who similarly painted portraits on monochromatic coloured backgrounds.

The influence of Whistler and the Impressionists became apparent in Katz’s later works, in the late 1980s. He moved away from the bold colours of his earlier work and began to take on a looser, more painterly style. Into the 21st century, his subjects continued to evolve, and he painted a large number of flowers in the form of stylised still lifes, such as Late Summer Flowers (2013) that harked back to his first experiments with the Impressionist genre in the early 1960s.
Alex Katz has admitted to destroying thousands of paintings during his first ten years of pursuing an artistic career. He sought to find his own unique identity, rather than conform to the expectations and styles of others. He rejected narrative and tried to paint faster than he could think.

Throughout his career, Alex Katz made friends and acquaintances with many prominent figures. He produced sets and costumes for choreographer Paul Taylor in the 1960s and used many dancers and models as subjects for his portrait work. He collaborated with the likes of Ted Berrigan, Ann Lauterbach, art critic Carter Ratcliff, and Gerard Malanga on several editions of Face of the Poet, and provided the etching illustrations for Gloria by Bill Berkson. In 1962, Harper’s Bazaar included wooden cut-outs by Katz in a four-page summer fashion article. As a result of this, and many more collaborations (including with his son Vincent), Katz made a name for himself in the world of the arts, advertising, fashion, literature, and popular media. Many writers have since conducted interviews with him, and in 1989, a special edition of Parkett was dedicated to him.
During his time in New York in the 1950s, Katz mainly produced collages of muted, simplified landscapes featuring human figures. The views he captured in his work were influenced by both his time in New York and Maine. The landscapes are all rendered in the same flat style, with sections blocked out in single colours, that has become synonymous with his name. It wasn't until the 1980s and 1990s that Katz returned to landscape painting; this time, rather than depicting figures in a particular setting, he wanted his large-scale paintings to ‘envelope’ the viewer in nature.

Once again a portrait of Katz’s wife Ada, The Red Band encapsulates the almost impossible combination of ambiguity and familiarity that has come to define the artist’s work. Bold colours and limited compositional line work show us two profiles of the sitter, not quite reflections, but clearly the same woman, who remains characterised by her distanced, enigmatic expression despite the closely cropped composition here.

Recently sold for £2,439,355 at Sotheby’s New York on October 28th 2020, The Red Band is particularly emblematic of Katz’s unique mode of realism. The ostensible simplicity of his painting draws us in, only to leave us questioning the motives of both painter and sitter. As Donald Kuspit so aptly summarises: “ For all their everydayness, Katz’s figures have a sense of ambient strangeness to them, suggesting the mystery of their inner existence, perhaps even to themselves.”

Alex
Katz

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Biography

Katz’s Portraiture and Rise to Fame

Record prices

1. £3.4M for Alex Katz's Blue Umbrella 1

2. £2.4M for Alex Katz's The Red Band

3. £2.0M for Alex Katz's East Interior

4 - 13.

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Alex Katz

Buy and sell Alex Katz prints

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Biography

Katz’s Portraiture and Rise to Fame

Katz, Pop Art and Impressionism

Life of the American Artist

Early Collage and Landscape Works

Record prices

1. £3.4M for Alex Katz's Blue Umbrella 1

2. £2.4M for Alex Katz's The Red Band

3. £2.0M for Alex Katz's East Interior

4 - 13.

Related Articles

Under The Hammer: Top Prices Paid For Alex Katz At Auction

Related artists

Google reviews

4.9

Michelle Swann

David Popik

Deborah Ann Bell

VICKIE JAMES

Li Smith

Ian Hall

About

Contact

Alex
Katz

Sell Your Art
with Us