The Red Smile

In The Red Smile, Alex Katz painted a profile of his wife Ada’s face, set against a smooth red background. Although the portrait bears Ada’s features, it’s simplified, almost billboard-style rendering seems generic—an effect reinforced by its large scale, nearly 7 x 10 feet. Katz’s broad, unmodulated expanses of color resist a three-dimensional reading, which allies his work with Minimalist art that reduced form to bare essentials. The scale of the work, coupled with the cropping of the image and its smooth painting surface, produces an effect that the artist describes as the “immediate sensation you see before you focus.”