Acquisitions/
1970/
Alex Katz/
Vincent and Tony

Since the mid-1950s Alex Katz has painted cool, spare depictions of landscapes, interiors, and figures. His works emphasize the flatness of the picture plane while remaining determinedly realist. Katz's insistence on figuration initially placed him outside the contemporary avant-garde mainstream, in which abstraction dominated. His inventive resolution of the demands of formalism and representation, however, responded to the Pop Art of the 1960s and established him as a leader in a new figurative tradition in painting.

Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York. In 1928 the family moved to St. Albans, Queens. From 1946 to 1949 he studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. His first one-person show came in 1954: an exhibition of paintings at the Roko Gallery in New York. In 1974 The Whitney Museum of American Art showed Alex Katz Prints, followed by a traveling retrospective exhibition Alex Katz in 1986. During his first ten years as a painter, Katz admitted to destroying a thousand paintings. Since the 1950s, he worked to create art more “freely” in the sense that he tried to paint “faster than he can think.” His works seem simple, but according to Katz they are more reductive, which is fitting to his personality.

Since the mid-1950s, Alex Katz has painted cool, spare depictions of landscapes, interiors, and figures. Although Katz’s insistence on figuration initially placed him outside the contemporary avant-garde mainstream,in which abstraction dominated, his inventive resolution of the demands of formalism and representation responded to the Pop Art movement of the 1960s and eventually established him as a leader of the new figurative tradition in painting. Often featuring his wife, family, and friends as portrait subjects, his works emphasize the flatness of the picture plane while remaining determinedly realistic, resulting in highly stylized images that appear at once specific and generic. This painting shows Katz’s son, Vincent, with his boyhood friend Tony.