Alex Katz

1927–

For more than sixty years Alex Katz has remained dedicated to figurative art in his paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, despite the influence—and, at times, dominance—of abstraction since the postwar era. In 1957 Katz met Ada Del Moro; they married the following year, and she became one of the most frequent subjects of his paintings. Their relationship began during a period of artistic transition for Katz following several years of making small- scale collages. He has recalled how he came to abandon these works for what would become his signature painting style: “I said that if I enlarged them to six feet then I could be very successful, but it was much more interesting to try to paint a contemporary portrait.”

Prior to beginning the large-scale work The Red Smile, Katz made several preparatory drawings as well as smaller versions of the painting. This drafting process and its results recall the work of the Old Masters of Renaissance and Baroque art rather than the spontaneous, abstract compositions of many of Katz’s peers. As Katz himself has explained, he also shares with his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artistic predecessors a desire to “search for beauty” in the visible world around him.

Evocative of a billboard advertisement or a film still, The Red Smile is a tightly cropped portrait of the head and shoulders of Ada, clad in a white shirt and blue headscarf. Her broadly smiling profile fills half of the horizontally oriented composition. With her distinctive fair skin and dark hair and eyebrows, she is as recognizable across Katz’s many paintings of her as are his signature expanses of flat, crisply delineated color.

Wikipedia entry

Introduction

Alex Katz (born July 24, 1927) is an American figurative artist known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints. Since 1951, Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. He is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colors are considered as precursors to Pop Art.

Wikidata identifier

Q919265

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Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 19, 2025.

Getty record

Country of birth

United States

Roles

Artist, collagist, graphic artist, painter, sculptor

ULAN identifier

500022493

Names

Alex Katz

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Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 19, 2025.

Not on view

First acquired
1961

Date of birth
July 24, 1927

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