Alex Katz valuation
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.
What a work by Alex Katz is worth
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Bio
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.
The print catalogue, and Gathering
Katz began making prints in 1965 and has made more than four hundred editions in lithography, etching, screenprint, woodcut and linocut. The Albertina in Vienna and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston each hold a complete set, and the Albertina published a catalogue raisonné of the prints in 2011, which is the reference for identifying one.
The Guggenheim in New York gave him a retrospective, Alex Katz: Gathering, from October 2022 to February 2023. His paintings divide almost equally between portraits and landscapes, the landscapes mostly of Maine and of his surroundings in New York.
Lincolnville, the cutouts and the Times Square billboard
Katz's father had lost a factory in Odesa, and in 1928 the family moved from Brooklyn to St Albans, Queens. He has spent his summers in a nineteenth-century clapboard farmhouse at Lincolnville, Maine, since 1954, and in 1996 Colby College opened a wing of its museum for the more than four hundred paintings, collages and prints he gave it. By his own account he destroyed about a thousand paintings in his first ten years while finding the style. A large canvas starts as a small oil sketch on Masonite, then a drawing, then a full-size cartoon pounced onto the canvas, which he paints in one session of six or seven hours.
The cutouts began in the late 1950s on wood and moved to aluminium. One Flight Up, of 1968, sets more than thirty heads of New York writers, critics and curators, John Ashbery and Henry Geldzahler among them, on a long metal table. He designed sets and costumes for the choreographer Paul Taylor from the early 1960s, filled a billboard over Times Square with twenty-three heads of women in 1977, and in the late 1980s began painting fashion models, Kate Moss and Christy Turlington among them. He names Utamaro's woodcuts as a source.
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