Rongliang, Lei
Mr. Gallagher
English CP 12
Due on: March 6, 2009

Alex Katz is a person who likes to portrait of the people, especially in his wife. A recent exhibition generously sampled Alex Katz’s many portraits of his wife, Ada, providing a synopsis of the artist’s career and a microcosm of an era. “Ada,” as Alex has painted her, is more than a person, as the best portrait personas usually are. (Good-life Ada) Alex Katz was born in New York City in 1927, and studied art at the Cooper Union from 1945 to 1949. He is a leading figure painter of the new realism movement in contemporary art. In the late 1950s, he found himself among a growing number of artists dissatisfied with the then-dominant stream of abstract expressionism, with its emphasis on formal abstraction. In the 1960s, he taught painting in New York. At a fairly early point he arrived at his signature blending of figure, landscape and abstraction—not too rough, a little goofy, a touch melancholic—and he has stayed with it. (The 60’s) Such images radiate a stylish-style classiness that is easy to savor. And their depictions of sociability, of people living in unostentatious comfort in city and country, have long made Mr. Katz particularly appealing to the art establishment, people who think of art and themselves in term of “us.” Gesture and pose the quirk of on eyebrow, the slant of a shoulder are small things that convey a lot, and at any scale, Katz is a master, this show speaks to his profound skill with paint and his absorption in solving the problem of his medium. But it also reads in a way that his larger painting do not. (Mcquaid) Alex said “tried plein-air painting, and found my subject matter and a reason to devote my life of painting”.
Base on the newspaper that I had read, I had some idea emerge in my mind. And that made me see the painting in their eyes. In the other way, I also wonder how he could paint his wife as the painting put in the exhibition. But he made his wife more than a people in the painting. It also showed his skill is very well. The pieces of his art that I like the most is the painting name “My mother’s dream”, it takes a similar approach four section, each passage of brushy gray competing with blue, again. Its sky through a canopy of trees, leaves stipple the air, positive and negative space shift into and out of each other. In the other painting, the homely painting directed the eye into its depths and away from the relentless flatness found in the more recent print, as though acknowledging a path taken and the possibility that beauty might be more than skin deep.