“Flowers are actually some of the most difficult forms to paint, because you have to capture the spatial aspect, their physicality, the surface of the flowers and the colors. You hope the whole painting will give the sensation of seeing a flower – the brilliance of that experience.”
A lex Katz’s Rose from 1966 blossoms across the canvas with the brilliant painterly verve that is most celebrated of the artist’s work. The petals energetically swirl open as Katz confidently employs lucious swaths of oil paint to give life to his magnified examination of a single pink rose. Much like his beloved portraits, Rose reinvents the classic canon of floral paintings in a style that perfectly typifies his oeuvre, in which forms are reduced to their most impactful and punchy. Katz masterfully reduces perspective, eliminates extraneous detail and sharpens the contours by closely cropping the single rose for an effect that is both exhilaratingly contemporary while simultaneously shifting fluidly between representational and abstraction. Rose illustrates Katz’s commitment to “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art” across his diverse subjects ranging from portraits of friends and family, often visited landscapes and the vigor of freshly blooming flowers (Robert Storr quoted in Alex Katz for Richard Gray Gallery).
Having studied Modern theories at Cooper Union, Katz emerged in the 1950s onto the New York art scene in a moment largely dominated by his Abstract Expressionist peers. Defying the dominant style of the t.mes , Katz eschewed his education and the artistic mode of the t.mes to forge his own idiosyncratic method of painting, which he has remained true to for over seven decades. Eminent collects or Paul J. Schupf, for whom Colby College Museum’s Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz is named, recognized Katz’s brilliance and collects ed the artist’s works in depth. Schupf acquired the present work from the Fischbach Gallery in New York, which further adds to the exceptional history of this fresh-to-market 1966 work.
“I tried Plein Air painting and found my subject matter and reason to devote my life to painting.”
Rose derives from Katz’s first foray into the flora motif in the 1960s, which he energetically returned to at the beginning of the new millennium. Rose stands as an exceptional example given the fact that a work of this subject, scale and historic date has never been offered at auction. Discussing his fascination with the motif, Katz’s shares “flowers are actually some of the most difficult forms to paint, because you have to capture the spatial aspect, their physicality, the surface of the flowers and the colors. You hope the whole painting will give the sensation of seeing a flower – the brilliance of that experience” (Alex Katz quoted in Thaddaeus Ropac, Flowers). Much like Katz masterfully captures the mood of a moment in his portraits and scenes, he conveys the feeling of awe when seeing a beautiful rose. Not a bouquet or simply a decorative painting, Rose eludes the archetypal representations of flowers and stands proudly as a celebration of Katz iconic style. By employing the same large scale, vivid colors, and wet on wet painting technique that lend his works their luxurious buttery surface, Katz gives the rose the prominence of his iconic sitters.
