Rendered in bold colours and with signature flatness, Anna is a brilliant example of Alex Katz’s distinctly stylised and markedly idiosyncratic aesthetic that has defined the contemporary figurative painting. Set against a vague backdrop of smooth colour and rendered in Katz’s impossibly cool, reductive style, the present work is an instantly recognisable example of the artist's iconic portraiture.
Image: © Jack Mitchell / Getty Images
Tightly cropped within the frames of the canvas is a cool yet mysterious female silhouette. Her depiction is characterised by the elimination of high-level surface detail and the subtle play of light and shadow that make for a wonderfully compact composition. Presenting a tranquil, contemplative moment or snapshot of everyday life, Anna is shown in quarter profile, pressed up against the very front of the picture plane, occupying nearly the entirety of the visual field. Rendered in a larger-than-life scale and cropped composition, Katz brings the figure intimately close the viewer, making it seem as if we are peering through the eyehole of a long-distance lens. Her bright blue eyes wide open and alert, Anna’s expression is utterly enigmatic, striking a compelling balance between accessibility and aloof remove. With flat solemnity and nonchalant elegance, Katz’s portraits conjure a sense of nostalgia, capturing the introspective, silent moments that precede narrative action. In his stunning perception of everyday life, Katz does not look to create a narrative, but rather a sense of wonder and intrigue, allowing the inscrutable nature of his subject to shine through. Typical of the artist’s oeuvre, the shallow pictorial field matched with the apparent expressivity of the depicted figure owe much to the crisp and detached manner of commercial art and illustration with further inspiration drawn from film, advertisements and fashion photography.
As seen in Anna, Katz eliminates the frames of reference from his paintings, allowing pure figuration and abstraction to reign supreme. Anna demonstrates Katz’s unparalleled ability to capture a moment, if not a second, in t.mes . The present work skilfully evinces the artist’s stylized practice in which portraiture becomes a recognizable yet beautifully distorted version of reality.
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Image: © Scala, Florence
Artwork: © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2022
“Katz’s portraits are true to the way we experience others. They eloquently convey the tension between the determinate outer appearance and the indeterminate inner reality of someone known only from the outside. Katz seems to make the shell of a person’s outer reality his or her complete substance, as though the person had no inner substance. Yet the quirkiness of Katz’s appearances alludes to that inner substance […] For all their everydayness, Katz’s figures have an air of transient strangeness to them, suggesting the mystery of their inner existence, perhaps even to themselves.”
Born in Brooklyn in 1927 and educated at The Cooper Union and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Katz settled on figuration as the primary focus of his artistic output from the beginning of his career. Emerging on the New York art scene of the 1950s, which was dominated by the titans of Abstract Expressionism, Katz brazenly forged his own path, eschewing the passion and primacy of gesture inherent to abstraction, to craft flat, polished scenes, awash in fields of colour that captured the sensation of lived experience. Prefiguring a renewed interest in realist painting, Katz developed his figurative style alongside the Pop artists. Like his contemporaries, he had a strong interest in the vernacular language of popular culture which translated into his paintings. Much in the same way Andy Warhol transformed a Campbell’s soup can into an instantly recognisable symbol, Katz transforms his circle of family and friends into visually arresting icons. However, the way in which he has used contemporary culture is in many ways opposed to Pop art — as he explains: “Pop art deals with signs, while my work deals with symbols. Pop art is cynical and ironic. My work is not. Those are big differences. Pop art is modern. My work is traditional.” (“Alex Katz Interviewed by David Salle,” in Alex Katz: Unfamiliar Images, Milan 2002, p. 16) By increasing the scale of his works, reducing perspective, eliminating extraneous detail and sharpening contours, he has created a definitive and idiosyncratic method of painting that speaks more to the history of portraiture and the figure in art.
Unclassifiable and never beholden to by any one style, Katz has avoided affiliation with any group of movement throughout his long and distinguished career. And yet, this in no way impeded him from becoming one of the most and celebrated artists of our t.mes . With bold brushwork, grand scale, and iconic stylistic flatness, Anna is an excellent example of the artist’s iconic aesthetic, as well as a visually powerful and seductive image in its own right.