The exhibition is curated by Guillermo Solana, artistic director of the museum, and benefits from the support of the artist and his studio, which are in close contact with this project. The exhibition includes about 30 large format oils accompanied by various studies, giving an overview of all the artist's usual themes: his individual, double and group portraits together with his characteristic flowers and sweeping landscapes painted in vivid colors and flat backgrounds.
The work Umbrella I and II depicts Ada Del Moro Katz, one of the most painted muses in the history of Western art. According to some estimates, her husband of over 60 years, Alex Katz, he's painted it over 200 times. Across her canvases and prints, Ada appears alternately upside down, twinned into multiple selves in a single room, hidden behind sunglasses, bound in a bathing cap, young, old, and everywhere in between. Her dark hair, long forehead, straight nose, and her restrained gaze are consistent traits in such divergent depictions. When collectors buy a picture of Ada, they buy into her mystique and the painter's romantic obsessions, both with his wife and the act of painting itself. Collectors are willing to pay a high price for such a symbol. Katz's Ada paintings are his most coveted works. Recently, they've started commanding seven figures at auction. Last year in London, Phillips set an auction record for Katz when he sold his 1972 portrait of Ada in the Rain, Blue Umbrella I, for £3,3m (about $4,1m): nearly three times its high estimate. Yet even with this excitement, Katz's market can seem chronically undervalued. Compared to painters of his generation, such as Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, and David Hockney, Katz makes art that sells remarkably cheap, in part, perhaps, because he remained remarkably prolific and his work has always been outside the box. dominant art -paradigm of the world. As Calvin Tomkins wrote in a 2018 New Yorker profile: “he has always had a direction to him, which hasn't been the direction of mainstream art in any of the past seven decades.”
Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927. In 1928, at the onset of the Depression, his family moved to St. Albans, a diverse suburb of Queens that arose between the two world wars. Katz was raised by his Russian emigre parents, both of whom were interested in poetry and the arts, his mother having been an actress in the Yiddish theatre. Katz attended Woodrow Wilson High School for its unique schedule that allowed him to devote his mornings to academics and his afternoons to the arts. In 1946, Katz entered the Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan. At Cooper Union, Katz studied painting with Morris Kantor and trained in modern art theories and techniques. After graduating in 1949, Katz was awarded a scholarship to study summer at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine, a scholarship which he would renew the following summer. During his years at Cooper Union, Katz had been primarily exposed to modern art and taught to paint from drawings. Skowhegan encouraged him to paint from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today. Katz explains that Skowhegan's plein air painting gave him "a reason to devote my life to painting."
Katz's first solo show was held at the Roko Gallery in 1954. Katz had begun to develop a circle of acquaintances within the second generation of New York School painters and their allies in the other arts. He counted among his friends the figurative painters Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter and Larry Rivers, the photographer Rudolph Burckhardt and the poets John Ashbery, Edwin Denby, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler. From 1955 to 1959, usually after a day of painting, Katz made small collages of figures into landscapes from hand-colored, delicately cut strips of paper. In the late 50s, he decided to attempt greater realism in his paintings of himself. He became increasingly interested in portraiture and painted his friends and especially his wife and muse, Ada. Katz began using monochromatic backgrounds, which would become a defining feature of his style, anticipating Pop Art and separating him from gestural figure painters and New Perceptual Realism. In 1959, Katz made his first painted cutout. At first these were cut out of canvas and mounted on shaped wood; soon, he started painting them directly on the cut wood. In the 60s he transitioned to painting directly onto shaped aluminum sheets, a practice that continued throughout his career, forming a series of freestanding or wall-mounted portraits that exist in real space. In the early 60s, influenced by film, television, and billboards, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cut faces. In 1965, he also embarked on a prolific career in print. Katz would go on to produce many editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and linocut. After 1964, Katz increasingly portrayed groups of figures. He continued to paint these complex groups into the 70s, portraying the social world of the painters, poets, critics and other colleagues around him. He began designing sets and costumes for choreographer Paul Taylor in the early 60s and has painted many images of dancers over the years. In the 80s, Katz tackled a new subject in his work: fashion models in designer clothes.
Beginning in 2010, Katz reframed his subject matter, employing more drastic cropping of individual portraits. He also began composing more portraits using cropped images of the same subject in sequence on linen. In recent years, Katz has often started his process by taking photographs with his iPhone, which he then prints, cuts and collages into compositions. From these maquettes she can make painted studies or go straight to making a large cardboard, from which she paints an oil on linen. During an extended stay in Pennslyvania from late winter to early summer of 2020, Katz made more than 50 paintings, mainly of flowers and landscapes that he saw around him.
Alex Katz's works are found in over 100 public collections worldwideor. Notably, those in America include: 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, DC; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Museum of Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Wadsworth University, Hartford; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In addition, Katz's work can be found in the Albertina (Austria), Museum Moderne Kunst (Austria), Ateneum Taidemuso (Finland), Sara Hildén Art Museum (Finland), Museum Brandhorst (Germany), Bayerische Museum (Germany), Fondation Louis Vuitton (France), Israel Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art (Japan), Berardo Collection (Portugal), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Spain), IVAM Center Julio Gonzalez (Spain), Nationalgalerie (Germany) ), and the Tate Gallery (England), among others.
