Ada with Sunglasses (Study no. 1)

Painted in 1969, Ada with Sunglasses is one of the most important paintings of Alex Katz’s career, as it features his most important and long-standing subject.
Alex Katz met his wife, Ada, in the fall of 1957 at the opening of an exhibition of his work at the Tanager Gallery. Elegant, poised and classically beautiful, Ada captivated the young artist from the moment he laid eyes on her. “Ada had a tan, and a great smile, and she was with this...fantastic-looking guy. But he didn’t put her coat on—I did,” the artist joked (A. Katz, quoted in C. Tomkins, “Alex Katz’s Life in Art,” The New Yorker, August 20, 2018). Since then, Katz has painted Ada over 250 times. She might be the most frequently painted artist’s muse in history, on par with, if not surpassing, Picasso’s Dora Maar.
Alex and Ada were married in February 1958, and since then, she has played countless roles in her husband’s work, with each portrayal revealing some new and undiscovered aspect of her personality. “Ada gave him a complex human presence that I don’t think I had seen before in his work,” the writer and critic Sanford Schwartz told The New Yorker in 2018 (S. Schwartz, quoted in C. Tomkins, op. cit., 2018). In paintings such as Ada (1957), Ada Ada (1959) and The Black Dress (1960), Ada debuted to the public as the smartly-dressed muse to her talented painter-husband. Slim and attractive, with her hair coiffed in an easy-going flip, Ada’s classical good looks make her an emblem of ‘60s style, on par with Jackie Kennedy. She evokes the age in which she was painted, but also remains timeless and enduring, in part due to the inscrutable, sphinxlike expression she often displays, made all the more pronounced by her signature red lipstick.