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Alex Katz
(American, born 1927)
Red Coat, 1983
Color screenprint on white wove paper
58 x 29”
Purchase: Gaines Challenge Fund 1986.1

Native New Yorker Alex Katz studied art in both Manhattan and Skowhegan, Maine. Like many American artists of his generation, he was inspired by the American Expressionists. He also worked, in the 1950s, in the dynamic manner of Jackson Pollock. Like Chuck Close, Katz created paintings based on photographs, but he also painted landscapes and figures from life. Katz later distinguished himself from his avant-garde contemporaries by focusing on purely representational art, rendering figures in vibrant planes of flat color. The artist was also adept at printmaking, and his work of the 1980s reflects the crisp nature of graphics. Red Coat, a portrait of the artist’s wife Ada, is like a collage in the way that the various shapes, saturated with color, fit together. Here, Katz has created a spellbinding image of a woman, dressed in a red coat and hat, who nonchalantly gazes out at the viewer.