Alex Katz
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.
This article is about the artist. For the baseball player, see Alex Katz (baseball).
Alex Katz
July 24, 1927
Early life and career[edit]
Alex Katz was born July 24, 1927, to a Jewish family[1] in Brooklyn, New York, as the son of an émigré who had lost a factory he owned in Russia to the Soviet revolution.[2] In 1928 the family moved to St. Albans, Queens, where Katz grew up.[3]
From 1946 to 1949 Katz studied at the Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 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."[4] Every year from early June to mid-September, Katz moves from his SoHo loft to a 19th-century clapboard farmhouse in Lincolnville, Maine.[5] A summer resident of Lincolnville since 1954, he has developed a close relationship with local Colby College. From 1954 to 1960, he made a number of small collages of still lifes, Maine landscapes, and small figures.[6] He met Ada Del Moro, who had studied biology at New York University, at a gallery opening in 1957.[2] 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 [he] can think."[7] His works seem simple, but according to Katz they are more reductive, which is fitting to his personality.[8] "(The) one thing I don't want to do is things already done. As for particular subject matter, I don't like narratives, basically."[9]
Exhibitions[edit]
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.[3] Katz' first one-person show was an exhibition of paintings at the Roko Gallery in New York in 1954. 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. The subject of over 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group shows internationally, Katz has since been honored with numerous retrospectives at museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Colby College Museum of Art, Maine; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden; Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga; and the Saatchi Gallery, London (1998).[38] In 1998, a survey of Katz' landscape paintings was shown at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, featuring nearly 40 pared-down paintings of urban or pastoral motifs.[39]
Katz is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York, Timothy Taylor Gallery in London, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris/Salzburg. Before showing with Brown, he had been represented by Pace Gallery for 10 years and by Marlborough Gallery for 30 years.[40]
The prints of Alex Katz are distributed in Europe by Galerie Frank Fluegel in Nuremberg. A retrospective of his work is currently (June - October 2022) on display at the Thyssen National Museum of Spain, the first time Katz´s work has been displayed in that country.
Collections[edit]
Katz's work is in the collections of over 100 public institutions worldwide, including the Honolulu Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Tate Gallery, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and the Museum Brandhorst, Munich.[41] In 2010, Anthony d'Offay donated a group of works by Katz to the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate; they are shown as part of the national touring programme, Artist Rooms.[42][43] In 2011, Katz donated Rush (1971), a series of 37 painted life-size cutout heads on aluminum, to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the piece is installed, frieze-like, in its own space.[44]
Recognition[edit]
Throughout his career, Katz has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Painting in 1972, and in 1987, both Pratt Institute's Mary Buckley Award for Achievement and 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 a U.S. government grant to participate in an educational and cultural exchange with the USSR.[45] Katz was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting in 1972. Katz was inducted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988, and recognized with honorary doctorates by Colby College, Maine (1984), and Colgate University, Hamilton, New York (2005). In 1990 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an associate member, and became a full Academician in 1994. He 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, a position first held by the painter and art critic Merlin James.[46] In 2005, Katz was the honored artist at the Chicago Humanities Festival's Inaugural Richard Gray Annual Visual Arts Series. In 2007, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Design, New York.[38]
In October 1996, the Colby College Museum of Art opened a 10,000-square-foot (930 m2) wing dedicated to Katz that features more than 400 oil paintings, collages, and prints donated by the artist.[47] In addition, he has purchased numerous pieces for the museum by artists such as Jennifer Bartlett, Chuck Close, Francesco Clemente, and Elizabeth Murray. In 2004, he curated a show at Colby of younger painters Elizabeth Peyton, Peter Doig and Merlin James, who work in the same figurative territory staked out by Katz.[2]
In 1996, Vincent Katz and Vivien Bittencourt produced a video titled Alex Katz: Five Hours, documenting the production of his painting January 3,[48] 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.
Legacy[edit]
Katz' work is said to have influenced many painters, such as David Salle, Helena Wurzel, Peter Halley and Richard Prince,[13] as well as younger artists like Peter Doig, Julian Opie, Liam Gillick, Elizabeth Peyton, Barb Januszkiewicz, Johan Andersson,[19] and Brian Alfred.[15] Furthermore, it has become ubiquitous in advertising and graphic design.