Alex Katz

Legendary American-born painter Alex Katz (b. 1927) is known for painting portraits and landscapes that possess a quality Robert Storr of the Museum of Modern Art defined as the unquantifiable "cool." Katz first exhibited in New York City in 1954; solo exhibitions have included the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the USF Contemporary Art Museum, Guggenheim Bilbao, the Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

 

TREE 8, TREE 10 

In 2020, Alex Katz exhibited Trees, a new series of three monumental paintings featuring early spring trees in Pennsylvania, at the chapel Sant’Andrea de Scaphis in Rome. From this series, Katz selected two paintings to be envisioned as prints using lithography, woodcut, and silkscreen techniques. Honoring the majestic presence of the earth’s landscapes, both prints elevate the perspective of the trees to express a reverence for nature and its cyclical processes. 

Tree 8 is a 6-run lithograph and woodcut print with the three initial woodcut runs building the crisp, blue background and defining the tree with sparse limbs to allow the wood grain to be visible throughout the print. The final three lithographic runs of orange, white and black translate the artist’s gestural brushstrokes to generate the highlights and shadows forming the trunk and branches, echoing the reflections of light in early spring. 

Tree 10 is a 10-run silkscreen using transparent inks to build density and create soft transitions in values capturing the depth of the tree. Transparent blues form the cerulean sky in contrast to the stark form of the tree and its branches rendered in monochromatic tones.

 

Sunrise

Alex Katz has painted landscapes throughout his career that often feature views from his home in Maine, as does Sunrise, this recent collaboration with Graphicstudio. Katz captures what he refers to as “the present tense,” or a “flash,” just before the image comes into focus. The moment is the early morning sun glowing beyond a forest of birch trees, a sublime scene as the sun rises from the horizon and scatters light in colors across the sky. The subjects of Katz’s landscapes are form, surface, space and light as they appear to him in nature. 

Sunrise is a 6-run lithograph, woodcut, screen print with the initial run a 3-color blend roll for the sky, followed by 3 additional lithographic runs of yellow, orange and a dense black. A hand-cut red oak woodcut with a transparent black ink is followed by a final screenprint run also in a very transparent flat black. This technique allows for the rich wood grain to be seen in the depths of the birch trees that are central to the image.  

 

TRACY, SHARON, KYM, MAE

Portraits are one of the great subjects of Alex Katz's paintings and prints. Katz's editions with Graphicstudio are illustrative of his signature approach and style of transforming his circle of family and friends into visually arresting icons. In Tracy, the artist shows the back of the model's head only, suggesting character and personality through the set of the shoulders and the contrasting gray and gold tonalities of the hair, skin, dress and background. Mae is deceptively simple with subtle tonalities and luminous layers.

 

COLEMAN POND II & III

Landscapes are also great subjects of Alex Katz's boldly simplified paintings and prints. Coleman Pond II and Coleman Pond III are characteristic of his minimalist treatment of the landscape: on a dark blue field or shifting downward from light to dark, a few spare lines define sky from earth and sketch out details of vegetation. The heliorelief (photographic woodcut) was created and printed in the mokuhanga style traditionally used for the famed Japanese ukiyo-e prints of the 17th through 19th centuries. The woodblock is shin-a or basswood veneer, and the ink is nikawa, hand-milled from pigment, fish-glue and water; the Japanese kozo paper is hand-printed with a hon baren.

 

KATE, WHITE HAT AND SUNGLASSES

At Graphicstudio Alex Katz explored the cyanotype technique, a printmaking process first invented in 1841 and commonly used for architectural blueprint drawings. Kate and White Hat and Sunglasses are outlined in vivid blue, the portrait is a bleed, where the print image is extended to the edges of the paper. Kate is a portrait of the American born actress Kate Valk, known for her title role Brutus Jones in the Wooster Group's acclaimed production "The Emperor Jones" by Eugene O'Neill. Alex Katz designed the show's poster featuring Kate Valk, which served as inspiration for the cyanotype print created at Graphicstudio. In White Hat and Sunglasses, the cartoonish preliminary sketch of Ada is revealed in the Prussian blue of the cyanotype process.

 

Maine Landscape

After one of the artist's first prints made in 1951, Maine Landscape, embodies the original version in heliorelief, a woodcut process developed at Graphicstudio in which an image on a translucent material is used to expose a light-sensitized woodblock, which is then cut with sandblasting. Characteristic of Katz's signature style, Maine Landscape is deceptively simple; its small size and forthright elements are immediately poignant and elegant.

 

Further Resources

Artist's Site: alexkatz.com

Printmaking + Sculpture Terms

Printmaking Glossary

Sculpture Glossary

Sales

For sales, or more information about an edition, please contact Graphicstudio at (813) 974-3503 or gsoffice@usf.edu.

Copyright + Reproduction

Images of the artwork are jointly owned by the artist and Graphicstudio. Reproduction of any kind including electronic media must be expressly approved by Graphicstudio.