National Gallery Of Art | Audio

Alex Katz, artist, in conversation with Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of modern art, National Gallery of Art. Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1927 and educated at Cooper Union. Although he fraternized in the 1950s with the abstract expressionists, Katz never embraced the gestural style popular in New York, clinging instead to some degree of observation. Yet if Katz's work has always celebrated the realism of quotidian life and landscape, it also incorporates the scale and structure of the ambitious abstract painting of his time. In 1968, Katz moved to an artists’ cooperative building in SoHo, where he has lived and worked ever since. Although he is best known for his figure paintings, often set in and around Manhattan, Katz is equally a painter of Maine, where he has summered for decades. Represented by 89 works in the Gallery’s collection, Katz’s career can be traced through generous gifts like Folding Chair (1959) and Isaac and Oliver (2013), and important acquisitions such as Swamp Map