Black Scarf

Alex Katz, Black Scarf, 1995, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Partial and promised gift of Samuel Rose and Julie Walters, 2001.38, © 1995, Alex Katz
Copied Alex Katz, Black Scarf, 1995, oil on canvas, 72 x 48 in. (182.9 x 121.9 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Partial and promised gift of Samuel Rose and Julie Walters, 2001.38, © 1995, Alex Katz

Artwork Details

Title
Black Scarf
Artist
Date
1995
Location
Not on view
Dimensions
72 x 48 in. (182.9 x 121.9 cm)
Copyright
© 1995, Alex Katz
Credit Line
Partial and promised gift of Samuel Rose and Julie Walters
Mediums Description
oil on canvas
Classifications
Subjects
  • Figure female — bust
  • Dress — accessory — scarf
Object Number
2001.38
Linked Open Data
https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/2001.38

Artwork Description

Black Scarf has the scale and impact of a billboard, but nevertheless offers a tender and intimate portrait of Alex Katz's wife, Ada. The image both acknowledges and stylizes the effects of aging on her reserved, fine-boned beauty. A breeze catches a lock of gray hair. Ada looks over her shoulder as though her attention had been distracted by something behind her, while her body turns in the opposite direction, as if moving forward. The image is like a film still that conveys the past, present, and future in one frame, and perhaps Katz was thinking of this convergence of time when he said that this was the "last great portrait" of Ada. Behind it lie the hundreds of images he had made of her since the 1950s as well as the history of their lives together.

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006

Related Books

crosscurrents_500.jpg
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.