Photo By Gail

Writing about Alex Katz’s work, Frank O’Hara identified his wife Ada’s complex role in her husbands iconography: “the heads and figures of Ada give this beautiful woman, through his interest in schema, a role as abstract as that of Helen of Troy; she is a presence and at the same time a pictorial conceit of style.”

The Black Dress (1960) presents a social gathering of a single individual. Dressed in an impeccable black cocktail dress that is a marker of urbane sophistication, Ada is multiplied six times across the canvas. In one of  her poses, she gazes at a 1959 portrait by her husband of the poet James Schuyler, which is itself doubled in a reproduction within this new painting. Unlike the deconstruction of cubism, in which a static object is represented through multiple viewpoints, Ada assumes varied poses as if different moments are being captured simultaneously.

The Black Dress foregrounds Ada’s performative agency within her husband’s artistic practice. “Ada has always been fascinated by cinematic gestures,” Alex Katz has said with regards to this painting. “All of these gestures are Ada’s decisions, not mine.“.

Photographed in the Guggenheim Museum in New York City