PROVENANCE:
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Sotheby’s, New York, May 9, 1990, lot 280
Private collection, Asia

EXHIBITED:
Alex Katz , Dimensions Art Center, Taichung, June 4-25; Taipei, July 8-23, 1995

ILLUSTRATED:
Alex Katz , Dimensions Art Center, Taipei, 1995, color illustrated, pp. 29-30

“THE ‘60S WERE A TURNING POINT IN AMERICAN ART HISTORY, BUT KATZ’S TURN WAS NOT TO POP ART, WHICH WAS A TONGUE-IN-CHEEK FAN LETTER TO CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION, NOR TO MINIMALISM, IN WHICH FORMALISM COMMITTED SUICIDE BY BECOMING SIMPLISTIC, NOR CONCEPTUALISM, IN WHICH ART AS A WHOLE COMMITTED SUICIDE BY SOLOMONICALLY DIVIDING ITSELF INTO IDEA AND MATERIAL AND TRIVIALIZING THE LATTER, BUT TO AN ORIGINAL, UNUSUALLY INSIGHTFUL INTEGRATION OF EXPRESSIONISM AND SOCIAL REALISM.” – DONALD KUSPIT

Alex Katz’s stylized aesthetic stems partially from his artistic response to Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s as he explored between formalism and representation. Beginning from the 50s, Katz became increasingly interested in portraiture and has completed numerous portraits of his wife, Ada, whom he married in 1958 and had since been the subject on the artist’s canvas for over 250 works thr oughout his career. The present lot “Ada with Green” exhibits Ada’s profile as she rests her head slightly against the palm of her right hand as she gazes into the distance. Her hair neatly pull up with strands of pigments that highlights the luminosity of her hair, further extenuating her prominent features and delicate eyelashes below her defined brows. All set against a dramatic lime green backdrop that epitomizes Katz’s monochromatic background, that became a defining characteristic in Katz work, his vibrant figurative paintings are rendered in a distinguished flat style infused with heightened colors and a bold simplicity that many scholars r egard as precursors to Pop art.

In the early 1960s, Katz was inspir ed by films, television, and billboar d advertising and began painting large-scale paintings, frequently with cropped faces. Katz paintings of larger scale usually began with a small oil sketch of his subject on a masonite board, he would then proceed to making a smaller detailed drawing in charcoal or pencil. Next, the artist would at times blow up the drawing with a overhead projector to be subsequently transfer to a large canvas through pouncing, a technique of the Renaissance artists that entails pushing powder ed pigment through small perforations pricked into the cartoon to recreate the composition on the surface to be painted. Katz would then proceed to paint his enormous canvas for hours each session. The artist also dedicated himself to printmaking and lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut, linoleum cut, costume and later fashion designs and fr eestanding sculptures of cutout figures painted on wood or aluminum.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Katz focused much of his attention on large landscape paintings that he characterizes as “environmental.” The artist’s landscape paintings often feature beautiful scenic views of New York and Maine. Katz deliberately loosened the edges of the forms in his landscape paintings. Katz began painting a series of night pictures in 1986, which contrasts greatly from the sunlit landscapes he had previously painted. Throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century, the artist’s exploration and variations on the theme of light falling thr ough branches is apparent. At the beginning of the new millennium, Katz also explore in the theme of floral in profusion, covering his canvases with blossoms similar to those he had first explored in the late 1960s, when he painted large close-ups of flowers in clusters and in solitude. It is apparent that Katz’s work continues to gr ow and evolve through out his prolific artistic career.

In retrospect, Katz’s family moved to a diverse suburb of Queens in St. Albans at the outset of the Depression in 1928. He enrolled in a prestigious school of art, architecture, and engineering at the The Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan in 1946, where his training was based in Modern art theories and techniques and studied extensively under Morris Kantor. Katz was awarded with a scholarship upon his graduation at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine where subsequently received an honorary doctorate in 1984 and has since then contin ued his relationship as a summer resident of Lincolnville, Maine. Katz’s has been the recipient of numerous accolades throughout his prolific career alongside countless solo and group exhibitions. For instance, In 1996, The Paul J. Schupf W ing for the Works of Alex Katz was opened to showcase an in-depth collection of Katz’s works. It is one of the few wings of a museum devoted solely to the work of a single li ving artist in the United States. In 2007, he was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy Museum, New York.

Katz has completed numerous commissioned works over the years. One of which was completed in 1977, when the artist was commissioned to create a work to be produced in billboard format above Times Square, New York City. The billboard extended 247 feet long along two sides of the RKO General building and wrapped in thee tiers above on a 60-foot tower and consisted of a frieze composed of 23 portrait heads of women. Each portrait measured twenty feet high. In 1980, Katz was commissioned by the US Gene ral Service Administration's Art in Architecture Program to create an oil on canvas mural in the new United States Attorney’s Building at Foley Square, New York City. The mural measures, is 20 feet high by 20 feet wide and resides inside the Silvio V. Mollo Building at Cardinal Hayes Place & Park Row. Since 1951, Alex Katz’s works have been included in more than than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions worldwide. Major exhibitions of Katz's landscape and portrait painting in America and Europe followed his 1986 Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective and 1988 print retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Selected solo exhibitions include: The High Museum, Atlanta; Guggenheim, Bilbao (2015–6); Tate St Ives; Turner Contemporary, Margate (both 2012) ; The National Portrait Gallery, London (2010); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007); Albertina, Vienna (2010); Saatchi Gallery, London (1998); P.S.1 / Institute for Contemporary Art, New York(1997-8 ); Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia (1996); Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden- Baden (1995); Brooklyn Musuem (1988). Works by Alex Katz can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide. Most notably, those in America include: The Art Institute of Chicago; The Brooklyn Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, England. among others.