ALEX KATZ (Brooklyn, New York, 24 July 1927).
"Homage to Degas", 2020.
Archival pigments on paper innova etching cotton rag 315, copy 42/100.
Hand signed and numbered in the lower left corner.
Work published in the artist's online catalogue raisonné.
Size: 92 x 181.5 cm; 96 x 186 cm (frame).
In this print, Katz pays homage to the French Impressionist painter Egdar Degas and his delicate dancers. Katz abstracts the gesture, synthesising a dance step in the elegant arm. The brightness of colour, the visible strokes and the absence of dark shadows are hallmarks of Katz's iconic portrait. The striking lime green contrasts with the dancer's skin and the warm brown of her hair. The simplicity of the work accentuates the young woman's serene expression. This work demonstrates Katz's ability to create compositions that are captivating in their simplicity.
Born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, Alex Katz moved with his family to Queens in 1928. From 1946 to 1949 Katz studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. This training proved fundamental to his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practice today. Katz explains that painting outdoors at Skowhegan gave him a reason to devote his life to painting. Katz's paintings fall almost equally into the genres of portraiture and landscape. Since the 1960s he has painted views of New York (especially his immediate surroundings in Soho), the landscapes of Maine, where he spends several months each year, as well as portraits of family members, artists, writers and leading figures in New York society. His paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form, their economy of line and their fresh but evocative emotional detachment. A key source of inspiration is the woodblock prints produced by the Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro. In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television and advertising posters, Katz began to paint large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. Most of his works depict close-ups, showing front and back views of the head of the same figure or figures looking at each other from opposite edges of the support. Since 1951, Alex Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. Katz's first solo exhibition was an exhibition of paintings at the Roko Gallery in New York in 1954. In 1974, the Whitney Museum of American Art showed Alex Katz Prints, followed by a retrospective exhibition of paintings and cut-outs entitled Alex Katz in 1986. Katz has had numerous retrospectives at museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Colby College Museum of Art, Maine; Staaliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden; Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga and Saatchi Gallery, London (1998). Katz's work is in the collections of over 100 public institutions around the world, including the Honolulu Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; the Tate Gallery, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and the Brandhorst Museum, Munich, among others.