Alex Katz Biography

Alex Katz was born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York. His family relocated to St. Albans, a diverse Queens suburb that had sprouted up between the wars, in 1928, at the start of the Depression. His Russian parents reared Katz in St. Albans. His mother had been an actress and had a strong interest in poetry, and his father, a businessman, had a strong interest in the arts as well. Katz chose Woodrow Wilson High School because of its innovative program, which allowed him to dedicate his mornings to academics and his afternoons to the arts. In 1946, Katz enrolled in The Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan, a famous art, architecture, and engineering college. Katz studied painting at The Cooper Union under Morris Kantor and was schooled in Modern art ideas and methods. After graduating in 1949, Katz was given a summer scholarship at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, which he would renew the following year. During his time at Cooper Union, Katz was largely exposed to modern art and was trained to paint from sketches. Skowhegan introduced him to painting from life, which was crucial in his growth as a painter and is still a part of his work today. Skowhegan's plein air painting, according to Katz, provided him "a purpose to commit my life to painting." In 1954, Katz had his first one-person display at the Roko Gallery. Katz had begun to make more connections with the New York School and its supporters in the other arts; he listed figurative painters Larry Rivers and Fairfield Porter, photographer Rudolph Burckhardt, and poets John Ashbery, Edwin Denby, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler among his pals. Katz produced tiny collages of figures in landscapes from hand-colored strips of carefully cut paper from 1955 to 1959, generally after a day of painting. In the late 1950s, he began to shift his works toward greater realism. Katz's passion in portraiture grew, and he painted his acquaintances as well as his wife and muse, Ada. He adopted monochromatic backdrops, which became a distinctive feature of his work, foreshadowing Pop Art and distinguishing him from gestural figure painters and New Perceptual Realism. Katz created his first cutout in 1959, which grew into a series of flat "sculptures"; freestanding or relief portraits that exist in real space. Katz began painting large-scale canvases, sometimes with radically cropped features, in the early 1960s, motivated by cinema, television, and billboard advertising. In 1965, he also began a successful printing career. Katz went on to create several editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut, and linoleum cut. Katz began to depict groups of people more frequently after 1964. He would continue to paint these intricate groupings until the 1970s, depicting the social life of his colleagues, including painters, poets, critics, and other artists. In the early 1960s, he began designing sets and costumes for choreographer Paul Taylor, and he has created numerous images of dancers over the years. In the 1980s, Katz expanded his work to include fashion models dressed in expensive clothes. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Katz devoted most of his time to big landscape paintings, which he refers to as "environmental." Rather of viewing a sight from a distance, the spectator is engulfed by surrounding nature. Katz began each of these canvases with "an notion of the landscape, a thought," then searched for the picture in nature. Katz relaxed the borders of his landscape paintings, completing the works with greater painterliness than before in these allover canvases. In 1986, Katz began painting a series of night images, which marked a significant change from the daylight landscapes he had previously painted, requiring him to experiment with a new sort of light. Throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, Katz's work incorporates variations on the theme of light falling through trees. Katz also began painting flowers in abundance towards the turn of the millennium, filling canvases in blooms akin to those he originally explored in the late 1960s, when he created enormous close-ups of flowers in solitary or in tiny groups. Katz recently begun painting a series of dancers and one of naked women, which was included in a 2011 exhibition at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover. Katz's art is still evolving and growing now. Since 1951, Alex Katz's art has been the focus of over 200 solo exhibits and almost 500 group exhibitions worldwide. Alex Katz Prints was on display at the Albertina Museum in Vienna in 2010, and featured a retrospective assessment of over 150 graphic works from Katz's recent donation of his entire graphic output to the museum. Alex Katz Portraits was on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, exhibited Alex Katz: New Work in June 2010, displaying new large-scale paintings inspired by his summers in Maine. Katz was also included in a 2010 exhibition titled Facing the Figure: Selections from the Permanent Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, coordinated by Marla Prather. Alex Katz: An American Way Of Seeing was on display at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland, the Musée Grenoble in Grenoble, France, and the Museum Kurhaus Kleve in Kleve, Germany from 2009 to 2010. Alex Katz: New York debuted in 2007 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland. The exhibition, which featured around 40 paintings and aquatints, was the first to focus only on Katz's relationship with his hometown. In 2006-2007, the Jewish Museum in New York exhibited Alex Katz Paints Ada, an exhibition of 40 paintings focusing on Katz's wife, Ada, ranging from 1957 to 2005. It was timed to coincide with Alex Katz: The Sixties, a PaceWildenstein show focused to Katz's paintings from the 1960s, which was on display from April 27 to June 17, 2006 at 545 West 22nd Street. Alex Katz in Maine, an exhibition of landscapes and portraits created over six decades, debuted in 2005 at The Farnsworth Art Museum and Wyeth Center in Rockland, Maine, and subsequently traveled to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 2005, the Colby College Museum of Art staged an exhibition of more than 70 of Katz's early collages, while the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain, displayed contemporary pieces. The first European exhibition devoted entirely to the artist's renowned portraits premiered in the summer of 2003 at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice. In 2003, an exhibition of the artist's aluminum cutouts debuted at Hamburg's Deichtorhallen and moved to Austria's Museum Moderner Kunst Kaernten. Major exhibits of Katz's landscape and portrait painting followed his Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective in 1986 and the Brooklyn Museum of Art print retrospective in 1988. These exhibitions have taken place at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden (1995), the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno in Valencia (1996), the P.S. 1/Institute for Contemporary Art in New York (1997-1998), the Saatchi Gallery in London (1998), the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea in Trento (1999), and the Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn (2002). A retrospective of Katz's print work was presented at the Albertina museum in Vienna in 2010 and will open in April of 2012 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz, which opened in 1996, hosts ongoing exhibitions of Katz's extensive collection of paintings, cutouts, drawings, and prints, which was made possible by the generosity of then-Colby trustee Paul J. Schupf and personal donations of works by Katz himself. The Schupf Wing is one of only a few museum wings in the United States dedicated entirely to the work of a single living artist. Throughout his career, Katz has earned several honors. The National Academy Museum in New York awarded him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. Katz received the Inaugural Richard Gray Annual Visual Arts Series Award from the Chicago Humanities Festival in 2005. In the same year, he received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, his second Honorary Doctorate after one from Colby College in Maine in 1984. In 2001, Katz was honored the Philip Morris Distinguished Artist at the American Academy in Berlin, and in 2000, he was awarded the Cooper Union Annual Artist of the City Award. Aside from this distinction from Cooper Union, his alma institution established the Alex Katz Visiting Chair in Painting in 1994, with an endowment given by the sale of 10 paintings donated by the artist. In 1988, Katz was admitted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1987, he won the Pratt Institute's Mary Buckley Award for Achievement, as well as the Queens Museum of Art's Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1985, the Chicago Bar Association presented Katz with the Award for Art in Public Places. In 1978, Katz was awarded a grant from the United States government to engage in an educational and cultural exchange in the Soviet Union. In 1972, Katz was granted the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Painting. Alex Katz's work may be found in over 100 public collections worldwide. The Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Brooklyn Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Des Moines Art Center; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Moreover, Katz's work can be found in the Albertine Graphische Sammelung (Austria), the Atenium Taidemuso (Finland), the Sara Hildén Art Museum (Finland), the Bayerische Museum (Germany), the Berardo Collection (Portugal), the Essl Collection (Austria), the French National Collection, the Israel Museum, the IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez (Spain), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Japan), the Museum Moderne Katz relocated to a SoHo artists' cooperative building in 1968, where he has lived and worked ever since. He still spends the summers in Lincolnville, Maine.

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