Alex Katz
Painted Ada six hundred times, flat, cool and very large, for seventy years.
Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn in 1927 and studied at Cooper Union and at Skowhegan in Maine, where he learned to paint outdoors and where he has spent every summer since. Against the prevailing abstraction of the 1950s he committed to the figure, and arrived at a manner of enormous flat areas, cropped close and painted from cartoons transferred to the canvas, that anticipates Pop without belonging to it. His wife Ada, whom he married in 1958, has been the subject of hundreds of paintings. He worked into his late nineties.
Katz has produced prints in very large quantity across sixty years — screenprints, lithographs, aquatints and woodcuts, in editions typically of sixty to three hundred — and these are what most sellers hold. Publisher, date and edition size vary enormously and set the value. The flat unmodulated colour makes fading, scuffing and any surface intervention immediately visible, and colour freshness is decisive. Paintings are unique and led by scale and by subject, with the Ada portraits and the large landscapes at the top. Cutouts on aluminium are a distinct category.
If you own a work by Alex Katz
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.