Alex Katz: A Painter’s Painter
Following a long overdue retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York and a survey at the Albertina in Vienna, VAULT looks at the remarkably consistent eight decade-long career of New York painter Alex Katz.
Image credit: Alex Katz, Blue Umbrella, 1979-80, lithograph in colours, 51.5 x 76.4 cm. Courtesy ALBERTINA, Vienna | © Bildrecht, Vienna 2023
When discussing ‘artist’s artists’, Alex Katz is not the first person to come to mind. Usually that phrase is reserved for artists like Eva Hesse or Joseph Beuys – figures with an outsized influence on subsequent generations of artists, but who are less understood or appreciated by the general public. Yet for much of his career, that would describe Alex Katz rather accurately. Throughout the decades he has found a diverse cast of supporters, spanning from Philip Guston in the 1960s to the Neo-expressionist painters Francesco Clemente and David Salle in the 1980s, through to Jacqueline Humphries and Shara Hughes more recently. All the while his institutional recognition has been somewhat lacklustre – for the last 35 years, Katz remained one of the few significant New York artists without a major survey exhibition in his home city.
That finally changed with the long overdue retrospective Alex Katz: Gathering, (which overlapped Alex Katz: Cool Painting at the Albertina in Vienna, Austria), which opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in October 2022. Covering an astonishing eight decades of work, the survey included paintings dating from the 1940s up until 2022. To put this into perspective, that is the full span of American post-War and contemporary art history, from Jackson Pollock to Jordon Wolfson and everything in between. Time is somewhat of a double-edged sword for Alex Katz: on the one hand, at age 95 he is finally seeing the institutional and market recognition that he has worked towards longer than ... Subscribe to read this article in full
