8 Ways Alex Katz Goes Beyond Pop Art By Rebecca Bates and Melissa Caspary The octogenarian painter and printmaker's decades-long career transcends labels, techniques, and movements. Alex Katz, "Sophie," 2012. "Pop art" is an easy label for Alex Katz's oeuvre, but not an altogether fair one. His double portrait of his wife, Ada, for example, predates Warhol's Double Elvis by about four years. Indeed, in an interview with Artspace in 2012, Katzclaimed, "Andy Warhol took a lot. The flat background, the figures, the double portraits—that all comes from me. I did the flat backgrounds and the figures in the late '50s, that was the most sensational style and everyone was looking at them, and so was he." Just before the rise of Pop, when painters and printmakers began incorporating elements of simple graphic design and pop culture references into their practices, Katz had already essentially laid claim to flat, monochromatic backgrounds, flat figures and (occasionally notable) faces rendered in bold color and clean lines. Before other artists tackled portraits of Jackie Kennedy and Mao, Katz had already used the likenesses of his famous friends to build a bold portfolio of portraiture, cutouts, and lithographs. In other words, this is an artist who transcends genre. A Katz painting or print is strictly Katzian—never wholly Pop, never truly a piece of abstraction, and never purely figurative. As four of Katz's prints come up in our latest Prints, Multiples, & Photography auction, we look at the subjects and themes that have helped Katz elude categorization. Alex Katz, "Grey Ribbon (from Alex and Ada, the 1960s to the 1980s)," 1990.1.Commitment to a Single Muse That Katz is prolific has been established. That Katz’s portraiture has remained fresh and engaging over the course of his career is also clear. But his wife, Ada, his muse above all others, may get the most face time of any of the artist's subjects. She appears in his work as a woman of many faces—in a 2011 piece, she’s elegantly styled with silver streaks in her hair; in The Black Dress, from 1960, six Adas wear the same classic dress; in several others, she dons a sleek swimming cap. Indeed, in 2006, the Jewish Museum presented “Alex Katz Paints Ada,” an exhibition of 40 Ada portraits (really only a sliver of the more than 250 paintings that star the artist’s wife) spanning nearly 50 years, the earliest of which dates from 1957. Of her experience as Katz’s most significant inspiration, Ada told the New York Times, “The thing I do remember from when we met is that I was sitting with my hands in my lap, and this guy that I was interested in was looking at my eyes, my ears, my shoulders. The whole thing was just very sensual. And I didn’t think I could handle it. But then it became just this thing that he did. I was sitting and he was painting, and that was it.” Alex Katz, "Anna Wintour," 2009. Photo courtesy of artcritical.com2.Portrait of a Lady Of course, Ada isn’t the only woman to grace a Katz canvas. Katz has used his flat, pared-down style to depict the likenesses of female friends, curators, and editors alike. Some of these works are simple portraits whose lack of narrative heightens the enigmatic qualities of the sitter. A recent standout is Katz’s painting of Anna Wintour. Her timeless bob is instantly recognizable, but gone are the Vogue editor’s ubiquitous glasses, usually worn as a kind of shield. Mouth relaxed, eyes unobscured, this is a stoic, but serene Anna. Still other female figures become more like Katz’s twist on classical studies of the human form. In Sarah(2011), Katz shows a dancer against a black background. Her back arches inward, her arms reach upward, and the piece becomes just as much an exploration of a body in motion as a portrait. Alex Katz, "Ted Berrigan," 1967. Photo courtesy of newyorkschoolpoets.wordpress.com.3.Enviable Squad Goals From the start, Katz was entrenched in a sophisticated circle of New York intelligentsia. Numbering among his friends were poets Frank O’Hara (who once wrote, “I think Katz is one of the most interesting painters in America.”), John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, and James Schuyler; photographer Rudy Burckhardt, who made a film about Katz in 1978; and fellow artists Larry Rivers and Fairfield Porter. Katz’s portrayals of many of these luminaries are just as much a record of the networking between artists and New York School poets at the time as they are portraits. Katz depicted working with an airbrush in his studio, experimented with cut-outs using Frank O’Hara as a model, and Kenneth Koch’s portrait became the cover for the book of his collected poems. Alex Katz, "Pas de Deux Suite," 1994.4.Plays Well in Groups The subjects of Katz’s portraits are often presented without context, placed against a background in a single hue, often no more narrative given than the sitters’ first names (e.g., Anna, Ada, Ulla, Sarah, etc.). Katz’s depictions of groups of people are even more disorienting. Inspired by a collaboration with choreographer Paul Taylor, Katz began painting vignettes of dancers in Taylor’s company. Against dark backgrounds, Katz’s flat style compresses the paintings’ visual planes, until it becomes difficult to immediately discern which limbs, which necks, what hair belongs to which dancer. Similarly, a painting of a cocktail party, though framed by a skyline in the background, becomes a dizzying crowd of angular noses and pale, nearly washed out faces—perhaps commentary on the banality of cocktail parties in general? Alex Katz, "Maine Landscape 2," 2005.5.Altering the Landscape From the late 1980s into the 1990s, Katz shifted his focus from portraits to landscapes, a genre in which he had always dabbled. Katz first practiced plein air painting while studying at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, during his undergraduate years at the Cooper Union in New York, and in the late ‘80s he returned to landscape with a mature and sophisticated approach. In addition to their large scale, stylized form, bold colors, and crisp, linear treatment of light, the lack of narrative in these scenes give them a distinctly contemporary feel. Many of Katz’s paintings depict landscapes in Maine around the summer home and studio where he continues to live and work each summer. In 2009, the artist toldSmithsonian Magazine, "’It's a conceit in a way...It's like you can paint the same river twice differently. I often paint in the same place. It's like painting Ada over and over again—to see if you can get something else out of the same subject matter.’" An exhibition of Katz's cutouts. Photo courtesy of artversed.com.6.Cutting Out a New Space Long acclaimed as a precursor to Pop art, Katz took his bold aesthetic one step further in 1959 when he began creating what he calls “cutouts,” blurring the line between painting and object. OvertMatisse reference aside, Katz’s cutouts offer a fresh take on portraiture by decontextualizing the figure and presenting it as a quasi-sculpture against the white gallery wall. After moving from complete scenes to figurative portraits on solid grounds of color, Katz’s next logical step was to remove the ground entirely and allow the portraits to exist on their own, first on wood and later on aluminum. Over a span of four decades, Katz has devoted 15 solo shows in galleries worldwide to this subsection of his oeuvre that has become increasingly relevant with the passing of time. Alex Katz, "Round Hill," 1977. Photo courtesy of soosanjoon.blogspot.com.7.Capturing the Leisure Class It might be easy to view Katz’s many paintings of beachside and lakefront vacationers, lying on lounge chairs and towels or reading under lawn umbrellas, as innocuous depictions of American leisure. In a 1991 interview conducted by Richard Prince, Katz remarked, “Frank O’Hara said, ‘I’m a little ashamed of our century but I have to smile.’ I prefer superficiality to communism, academies (A. E. or otherwise), fascism, serious avant-garde, born-again religion, neo-nazis, and French philosophers.” Indeed, latent in Katz’s scenes of sunny, carefree vacations is a sly sense of cultural anxiety. Beachgoers are neatly arranged on the sand, beach reads are consumed, tans are attempted. But, rendered in Katz’s flat style, these scenes become all surface, a smile covering tension. Alex Katz, "Ada in Cap," 2012.8.Experimenting with Prints “It was just something that people do so I thought that I would try it,” Katz told Artspace in 2012, of his first forays into printmaking. Still, Katz has kept up a steady output of prints and editions since he first began experimenting with etchings, woodcuts, and stencils at a New York print shop in the 1950s. The first print Katz made from one of his paintings, however, was a silkscreen of Luna Park, in 1965. In turning his notable paintings into prints, Katz hoped to create an image that had the same “wall power” as his painted work, but would be more accessible to his growing fan base. Moreover, Katz’s printmaking is where one sees the greatest variety of technique in the artist’s oeuvre. He tells Artspace that while discovering new hues is an accidental opportunity in the printmaking process, his photocollages have allowed him to play with previously printed material. .