Untitled

In the marvelous intimacy of Untitled, the great painter of modern life Alex Katz touchingly renders a portrait of his wife, Ada with their newborn son, Vincent. Painted soon after the birth of their first and only child on June 4^th, 1960, the present work evokes the couple’s newfound parental joy and excitement. This panel painting, early in the artist’s career, looks forward to Katz’s later celebrated portraits of his wife, as well as his artistic development toward the stylized, flattened figuration of his mature period. Katz intensifies the tender intimacy of this work through the novel employment of several motifs drawn from art history, reconstituting the Western tradition for the 20^th century as he sought to contrast his style from the contemporaneous Abstract Expressionists. This resulting figuration within abstraction provided an alternative path for painters to explore, delivering successive generations of painters ample inspiration in the figurative tradition.

Ada and Vincent elegantly emerge out from the subdued cool tones gently articulating the boundaries of a bedroom. Katz makes sparing use of his concise brushstrokes to suggest the bedroom setting. Ada, looking outward, holds Vincent in her cross-legged lap as the infant lurches out rightward. Katz being a keen student of art history, the present work suggests a version of the Madonna and Child motif popularized in Renaissance Florence—famously invented by Michelangelo—where the child is in movement, pushing away from his mother in anticipation of his future destiny. Katz imbues the work with a further art historical connection in his novel use of a painted circular framing device around the portrait; the work becomes a tondo, a circular Renaissance artform traditionally commissioned by husbands to gift to their wives after childbirth. Katz further emphasizes this art historical reference through his choice of medium, painting with oil on panel like an Old Master. That the artist reprises these traditions in Untitled after the birth of his own child electrifies the present work with an emotional charge conveying the new family’s exciting future. Across his long career, Katz formulates his idiosyncratic brand of modern painting in relation to the past: “I think of my paintings as different from some others in that they derive a lot from modern paintings as well as from older paintings…They’re traditional because all painting belongs to the paintings before them, and they’re modernistic because they’re responsive to the immediate” (A. Katz, quoted in R. Marshall, Alex Katz, New York, 1986, p. 22). The first vestiges of this novel approach emblematic to Katz’s oeuvre are strikingly suggested in Untitled.

Spanning more than eight decades, Katz’s artistic production transcends contemporaneous artistic movements. Breaking into the New York art scene in the 1950s during the rise of New York School gestural abstraction, Katz’s oeuvre parallels Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art movements without remaining indebted to them. The artist’s sustained interest in the aesthetics of popular culture refashions an iconography of the everyday subject.