Rongliang, Lei

Ryan Gallagher

English 12 CP, Period 6

06 March 2009

Portrait painting Alex Katz
Alex Katz is an American figural artist associated with the Pop art movement. In particular, he is known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints. Internationally recognized painter and printmaker Alex Katz was born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York. A retrospective of his paintings was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986. In 1988 the Brooklyn Museum exhibited his prints. The Saatchi Collection in London presented a 25-year survey of his paintings in 1998. This interview with Alex Katz took place in September 1998 in his studio. It was published on Art2u in 1999. (Walker, par1) Because one of the three museums shows of your work is an exhibition of paintings of your wife, Ada, The material from the museum quotes Irving Sandler, that Ada "is woman, wife, mother, muse, model, sociable hostess, myth, icon, and New York goddess.” How the forty portraits (from 1957 forward) indicate these various aspects of Ada, we’ll leave to others to determine. He had said in an interview with Brian Appel that you “ran into Ada in ’57.”(Kotzin, Par20) During his first ten years as a painter, Katz admitted to destroying a thousand paintings. Since the 1950s, he worked to create art more “freely” in the sense that he tried to paint “faster than [he] can think.” His works seem simple, but according to Katz they are more reductive, which is fitting to his personality. In 1994 Cooper Union Art School created the Alex Katz Visiting Chair in Painting with the endowment provided by the sale of ten paintings donated by the artist.
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.