As one of America’s most important and innovative post-war painters, Alex Katz reinvigorated portraiture in an era when non-representational abstraction dominated the art world. Emerging in the 1940s and 1950s, Katz resisted the Modernist dogma and instead invented new forms of figuration that represented everyday moments from his own life. Embracing the cultural vernacular, the artist painted family members and friends with views of New York, often his immediate surroundings in lower Manhattan, propelling them into the echelons of fine art.
Katz is often referred to as a quintessential American painter for his direct visual vocabulary. Despite growing up in the New York art world of the 1950s, he resisted the dominant stylistic conventions of the period – Cubism, Bauhaus design, and most notably Abstract Expressionism – and in its place championed figuration. Forgoing Modernist abstraction, Katz was fascinated with the technical side of fine art, namely painting and drawing, and looked to Paul Klee, Pierre Bonnard and especially Henri Matisse for inspiration. In 1949, Katz studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where the traditional plein-air teacher exposed Katz to painting directly from life. Combining moments from his everyday life and a commitment to figuration, Katz developed a new way to paint portraits using bold simplicity and heightened colours.