Alex Katz

Looking at Art With Alex Katz, hardback monograph hand signed by Alex Katz

2018

Alex Katz Alex Katz Black and White (Hand signed by Alex Katz), 2017 Hardback monograph with no dust jacket as issued (Hand signed by Alex Katz) Hand signed by Alex Katz on the first...

No Kids – Come Into My House, 2008 Autographed by Alex Katz in 2013 Vinyl, Album, LP Tomlab – tom 108 lp The artwork depicted on this album cover is “Ives Field I”, an oil on linen ...

Alex Katz - New Cutouts Accordion Card at Robert Miller Gallery (Hand Signed by Alex Katz) , from the Estate of UACC President Cordelia Platt, 1993 This marvelous hand signed and dat...

Will Barnet: A Timeless World (hand signed, dated and warmly inscribed), 2000 Softback monograph with stiff wraps (hand signed, dated and warmly inscribed) Hand signed, dated and warmly inscribed to Margo by Will Barnet on the half title page 12 × 9 × 1/2 inches We believe the colleague Margo refers to renowned African American artist Margo Humphrey, who also worked at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking with Will Barnet. The full inscription reads: Sep 21 2000 To my colleague -Margo- with appreciation and affection Will Barnet Book information: Published by the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey and Distributed by Rutgers University Press English; Paperback; 124 pages containing 43 color and 20 black-and-white illustrations Publisher's blurb: Painter and printmaker Will Barnet has actively participated in the New York art world for nearly 70 years. A leading figure in the Indian Space painting movement of the late 1940s, Barnet stressed the spatial structures of Northwest Coast Indian art. Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, he made a series of hardedged, totemic abstractions marked by their "all-positive" space, which he described as austere, classical expressions of Indian culture. He then moved on to new art forms in the 1960s and 1970s, creating a series of family and art world portraits that achieved a remarkable balance between the formal demands of abstraction and the humanist aspects of representation. Will Barnet: A Timeless World is the first substantial publications to unify Barnet's prodigious output. Art historian Gail Stavitsky provides an overview of this artist's entire career. Twig Johnson, the museum's curator of Native American Art, discusses the relationship of Barnet's work to this important indigenous artistic tradition. Jessica Nicoll, chief curator at the Portland Museum of Art, explores the profound impact of New England upon Barnet and his work. Many of Barnet's works are beautifully reproduced in this catalog, containing 43 color and 20 black-and-white illustrations. More about Will Barnet: Will Barnet was born in Beverly, Massachusetts in 1911. He has taught and exhibited widely over his more than seventy-five year career. His works are in the collection of virtually every American museum, including locally The Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of American. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In fall 2011 the National Academy Museum will present a retrospective exhibition being organized by Bruce Weber. Barnet is represented exclusively by Alexandre Gallery...

This original lithograph poster by Alex Katz, created for the American Dance Festival in 1993, is a remarkable example of the artist’s ability to capture the elegance and fluidity of...

Alex Katz “From the 60's” announcement card 1987: Rare vintage Alex Katz announcement card published on the occasion of Alex Katz 'From the 60's' Robert Miller Gallery New York 1987....

Alex Katz uses outline drawings, called “cartoons”, as templates to transfer full size images onto the canvas prior to painting. Rendered in red chalk or charcoal on brown paper, th...

Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927. In 1928, at the outset of the Depression, his family moved to St. Albans, a diverse suburb of Queens that had sprung up between the two wars. Katz was raised in St. Albans by his Russian parents. His mother had been an actress and possessed a deep interest in poetry and his father, a businessman, also had an interest in the arts. Katz attended Woodrow Wilson High School for its unique program 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, a prestigious college of art, architecture, and engineering. At The Cooper Union, Katz studied painting under Morris Kantor and was trained in Modern art theories and techniques. Upon graduating in 1949, Katz was awarded a scholarship for summer study at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine, a grant that he would renew the following summer. During his years at Cooper Union, Katz had been exposed primarily to modern art and was taught to paint from drawings. Skowhegan exposed him to painting 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 one-person show was held at the Roko Gallery in 1954. Katz had begun to develop greater acquaintances with the New York School and their allies in the other arts; he counted amongst his friends’ figurative painters Larry Rivers and Fairfield Porter, photographer Rudolph Burckhardt, and poets John Ashbery, Edwin Denby, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. From 1955 to 1959, usually following a day of painting, Katz made small collages of figures in landscapes from hand-colored strips of delicately cut paper. In the late 1950s, he moved towards greater realism in his paintings. Katz became increasingly interested in portraiture, and painted his friends and his wife and muse, Ada. He embraced monochrome backgrounds, which would become a defining characteristic of his style, anticipating Pop Art and separating him from gestural figure painters and the New Perceptual Realism. In 1959, Katz made his first cutout, which would grow into a series of flat “sculptures;” freestanding or relief portraits that exist in actual space. In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. In 1965, he also embarked on a prolific career in printmaking. Katz would go on to produce many editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and linoleum cut. After 1964, Katz increasingly portrayed groups of figures. He would continue painting these complex groups into the 1970s, portraying the social world of painters, poets, critics, and other colleagues that surrounded him. He began designing sets and costumes for choreographer Paul Taylor in the early 1960s, and he has painted many images of dancers throughout the years. In the 1980s, Katz took on a new subject in his work: fashion models in designer clothing. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Katz focused much of his attention on large landscape paintings, which he characterizes as “environmental.” Rather than observing a scene from afar, the viewer feels enveloped by nearby nature. Katz began each of these canvases with “an idea of the landscape, a conception,” trying to find the image in nature afterwards. In his landscape paintings, Katz loosened the edges of the forms, executing the works with greater painterliness than before in these allover canvases. In 1986, Katz began painting a series of night pictures—a sharp departure from the sunlit landscapes he had previously painted, forcing him to explore a new type of light. Variations on the theme of light falling through branches appear in Katz’s work throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century. At the beginning of the new millennium, Katz also began painting flowers in profusion, covering canvases in blossoms similar to those he had first explored in the late 1960s, when he painted large close-ups of flowers in solitude or in small clusters. More recently Katz began painting a series of dancers and one of nudes, which was the subject of a 2011 exhibition at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover. Katz’s work continues to grow and evolve today. Alex Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions internationally since 1951. In 2010, Alex Katz Prints was on view at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, which showed a retrospective survey of over 150 graphic works from a recent donation to the museum by Katz of his complete graphic oeuvre. The National Portrait Gallery in London presented an exhibition titled Alex Katz Portraits. In June 2010, The Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine opened Alex Katz: New Work, exhibiting recent large-scale paintings inspired by his summers spent in Maine. Katz was also represented in a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, curated by Marla Prather, entitled Facing the Figure: Selections from the Permanent Collection, 2010. In 2009-2010, Alex Katz: An American Way Of Seeing was on view at the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland; Musée Grenoble, Grenoble, France; and the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, Germany. In 2007, Alex Katz: New York opened at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland. The show, which included approximately 40 paintings and aquatints, was the first exhibition to concentrate primarily on Katz’s relationship with his native city. The Jewish Museum, New York, presented Alex Katz Paints Ada in 2006-2007, an exhibition of 40 paintings focused on Katz’s wife, Ada, dating from 1957 to 2005. It coincided with an exhibition devoted to Katz’s paintings of the 1960s at PaceWildenstein, Alex Katz: The Sixties, on view from April 27 through June 17, 2006 at 545 West 22nd Street. Alex Katz in Maine, an exhibition of landscapes and portraits made over six decades, opened at The Farnsworth Art Museum and Wyeth...