Artist

Alex Katz

born New York City 1927
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Courtesy Alex Katz Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Born
New York, New York, United States
Biography

Alex Katz's paintings and sculptures monumentalize common moments of everyday life. Katz was influenced by the golden age of the billboard business when hand-painted advertisements became an art form as well as a distraction on America's highways. He paints in a simple, direct style using large areas of unmodulated colors to attract our attention. Roadside signs with moving parts, in which the figures extended beyond the billboard, also motivated Katz to produce canvas cutouts pasted onto wooden boards, fashioning life-size figures that are like huge paper dolls. (Marshall, Alex Katz, 1986)

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Crosscurrents: Modern Art from the Sam Rose and Julie Walters Collection
In eighty-eight striking paintings and sculptures, Crosscurrents captures modernism as it moved from early abstractions by O’Keeffe, to Picasso and Pollock in midcentury, to pop riffs on contemporary culture by Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud, and Tom Wesselmann—all illustrating the complexity and energy of a distinctly American modernism.