ALEX KATZ Alex Katz was born in New York City in 1927. He studied at the Cooper Union Art School and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. While it resists classification his art combines the twin streams abstraction and realism found in post-World War II American art. Alex Katz has been a representational painter from the outset of his career in the early fifties. In his work modern images are rendered in an idyllic and simplified world.
Emphasis is on skin-deep surfaces.
I like life to be pleasant and simple. Faces are simplified and reduced to a few flat-color areas with skin tones shown by shadows and highlights. His light is so schematic that all images are flatten. The juxtaposition of two different scales is what makes so many of Katz's composition comparable to sixteenth century Mannerist painting. The exaggerated contrast between large faces and small figures or Large faces and smaller faces is a Mannerist device that Katz has handled with imaginative dexterity and authority.