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Have you ever dreamt of having your own private museum tour with one of the world’s most-celebrated artists? Take a walk through art history in the company of one of the pre-eminent American painters of our time, Alex Katz. Describing his personal encounters with the work of over 90 key artists, Katz’s observations offer a fluent, vivid and incisive view, making Looking at Art with Alex Katz the perfect guide both for those looking for an introduction to the world of visual art, and anyone looking for a fresh view on their favorite artist. Includes entries on: Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Cézanne, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Doig, Alberto Giacometti, Philip Guston, David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Edvard Munch, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Rembrandt, Henri Rousseau, Titian, Luc Tuymans, Vincent van Gogh, Johannes Vermeer and more.

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Alex Katz illustrates Hawthorne’s classic gothic tale of Puritan New England While enrolled in an illustration course at Cooper Union in 1948, Alex Katz (born 1927) created nine ink drawings to accompany Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gothic romance, The House of the Seven Gables. Published a century earlier, in 1851, Hawthorne’s classic novel is a solemn study of greed, guilt and atonement under the Puritan moral code of 19th-century New England, inspired by the curse pronounced on Hawthorne's own family by a condemned woman during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) was one of the most influential American writers of the 19th century, known for his darkly romantic stories and novels such as The Scarlet Letter. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and belonged to a prominent circle of New England–based writers and philosophers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott. Alex Katz (born 1927) is a New York–based artist known for his large-scale Pop-inspired canvases of two-dimensional figures set against monochrome backgrounds. For over seven decades, his work has been the subject of hundreds of solo and group exhibitions worldwide.

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Alex Katz celebrates an old friendship, illustrating Brainard’s 1970s journals with charcoal flower drawings In this tender posthumous collaboration initiated by Alex Katz (born 1927), the artist embellishes journal entries by his old friend Joe Brainard (1941–94) with a new series of exquisite charcoal drawings of flowers (a popular motif in Brainard’s own art). Katz and Brainard often collaborated with poets—particularly those of the New York School, such as Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman and Ron Padgett—on artists' books, poetry publications, book covers, writings and paintings. Brainard’s journal entries in this volume, written between 1971 and 1972, express this milieu, with accounts of conversations and expeditions with Waldman and Padgett as well as frequent mention of his appreciation for Katz’s work: “How Alex has remained so pure all these years is beyond me,” he notes in one entry, enumerating his favorite Katz works. Katz’s charcoal drawings are simple and clear in execution, matching the serene clarity that famously characterizes Brainard’s prose.

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A sumptuous edition of Melville’s epic tale of hubris and obsession, gorgeously illustrated by Alex Katz In 1948, while enrolled in an illustration course at Cooper Union, Alex Katz (born 1927) created 27 pen and ink drawings inspired by Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Katz, who had first read the book at 13 years old, was drawn to its experimental and digressive structure. Moby-Dick “doesn’t really have a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he notes; rather, “it’s a big form.” The artist’s whimsical illustrations capture this quality while expressing the early formation of his now highly recognizable style, celebrated for its elegant formal economy. Katz later returned to maritime motifs with a series of work based on his trips to Maine that began in the mid-1950s. Like Melville’s literary attempts to elude representation, Katz’s drawings attempt to represent the unknowable. “The great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last,” Melville writes. “True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness.”

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The serial and the sartorial: permutations of a motif in new portraits by Alex Katz Published for the artist’s 2021 show at Gray Chicago, Alex Katz: The White Coat debuts the latest series from Alex Katz (born 1927), titled Vivien in White Coat: 11 large-scale portraits depicting Vivien Bittencourt, the painter’s daughter-in-law, wearing a radiant white coat. Using a palette dominated by white, black and pale blue, Katz radically crops and magnifies the figure from an array of dynamic perspectives within the picture plane. Balancing the specific and the abstract, the intimate and the remote, the geometric and the gestural, Katz positions the figure in space with deftness, brevity and sartorial elegance. Notwithstanding Katz’s seriality, the white coat appears mysterious and enigmatic within each composition. Alex Katz: The White Coat features an essay by renowned curator and writer Jan Verwoert, 42 color illustrations and an artist’s biography.

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Elegant monochrome glamour in Katz's new print series This handsome clothbound catalog gathers Alex Katz’s recent titular print portfolio. The series of 25 prints features close-up, black-and-white portraits that remove the subjects from any contextual backdrop, emphasizing instead subtle shifts in expression. Rendered in bold lineation and tightly framed, the women depicted recall the models and celebrities featured in mid-20th-century fashion imagery, underscoring Katz’s ongoing fascination with perceptions of beauty and glamour that permeate the public sphere. The portraits are bookended by a pair of meditations on beauty: Carter Ratcliff imagines a comedically philosophical dialogue between himself and beauty, and Jarrett Earnest shares 31 encounters with beauty in art and life. Alex Katz (born 1927) is one of America’s most iconic and prolific artists. His work has been the subject of more than 250 solo exhibitions and 500 group exhibitions since 1951 and can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide. Katz is best known for his large-scale canvases of flatly rendered figures cast against a monochrome background.

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The evolution of Alex Katz: nearly 80 years of restless innovation in portraiture and landscape across painting, works on paper and sculpture Across decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz has sought to capture a state of “absolute awareness” in paint. Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of “quick things passing,” compressing the flux of everyday life into a condensed burst of optical perception. Published on the occasion of the artist’s first US career retrospective in more than 30 years, Alex Katz: Gathering offers a definitive account of Katz’s artistic project, demonstrating both its marked coherence and restless evolution. Generously illustrated, the book features the full breadth of the artist’s work across mediums and formats, from intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway in the late 1940s to the rapturous, monumentally scaled landscapes that have dominated his recent production. Essays by artists, writers and art historians offer fresh, authoritative overviews of the artist’s practice alongside more focused considerations of specific facets of his art, including his flower paintings, collages, prints, freestanding “cutouts” and set design collaborations with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. A sourcebook of historical reviews, essays and poems rounds out the volume, which offers an overdue reassessment of the artist’s oeuvre. Alex Katz (born 1927) is one of America’s most iconic and prolific artists. His work has been the subject of more than 250 solo exhibitions and 500 group exhibitions since 1951 and can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide.

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