Publisher description

The serial and the sartorial: permutations of a motif in new portraits by Alex Katz Published for the artist's 2021 show at Gray Chicago, Alex Katz: The White Coat debuts the latest series from Alex Katz (born 1927), titled Vivien in White Coat: 11 large-scale portraits depicting Vivien Bittencourt, the painter's daughter-in-law, wearing a radiant white coat. Using a palette dominated by white, black and pale blue, Katz radically crops and magnifies the figure from an array of dynamic perspectives within the picture plane. Balancing the specific and the abstract, the intimate and the remote, the geometric and the gestural, Katz positions the figure in space with deftness, brevity and sartorial elegance. Notwithstanding Katz's seriality, the white coat appears mysterious and enigmatic within each composition. Alex Katz: The White Coat features an essay by renowned curator and writer Jan Verwoert, 42 color illustrations and an artist's biography.

The definitive Alex Katz book, like his iconic paintings, is larger than life. With more than 300 images, many unpublished, and a searching profile by an art historian who has studied the painter for more than half a century, this monograph charts the development of Katz's singular American style. 2020 GOLD WINNER OF THE FOREWORD INDIES AWARD IN ART Alex Katz has found his audience. It's not the first time. Over seven decades, the artist has developed his vision with determination as the tides of avant-garde and academic fashion ebbed and flowed. His first audience was other painters (including de Kooning and Philip Guston), and today, still, he is perhaps best understood by other artists: those who appreciate how difficult it is to make something so simple, so well. Working in a representational style while his classmates celebrated Abstract Expressionism, eschewing slick surfaces for a pared-down view while his peers went glossy with Pop, Katz cleaved to one vision, a few locations, and subjects. Katz's endurance and commitment to developing an original American style is explored in depth, from his boyhood influences to an artistic circle that included John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Lois Dodd, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, Fairfield Porter, Yvonne Rainer, Larry Rivers, and Paul Taylor. Sketches, works on paper, and archival material selected by the artist's son, the poet Vincent Katz, give a fuller picture of the painter and his world. The more than 250 paintings--reproduced at an unprecedented scale--will be the most comprehensive collection available in a single publication.

Alex Katz (born 1927) is best known as a painter--specifically, as a painter of his family and his distinguished circle of friends, including poets, writers and artists. In the early 1950s, he began experimenting with printmaking, but it was not until the mid 1960s that he intensified his interest and production in the medium. Pushing at the limits of various printing techniques, Katz tested out pictorial ideas first conceived for his paintings, retaining planes of matte color but further simplifying his forms and dramatically cropping his images. These reduced compositions were wonderfully compatible with the graphic clarity of printmaking, and by effectively translating his paintings into prints, the artist achieved what he called the "final synthesis of painting." This publication provides insight into an often-neglected yet vital aspect of Katz's work, from the early 1950s to the present day.