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.”
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Alex Katz, The Black Dress
Photo By Gail Worley
In Blue Umbrella 2 (1972), Alex Katz depicts Ada Katz, his wife and most iconic subject. Over the course of a collaboration between artist and sitter that stretches from the late 1950s to today, Katz has portrayed Ada in countless guises, from radiant ingénue, to preoccupied young mother, to reflective nonagenarian.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Alex Katz, Blue Umbrella 2
Photo By Gail
A powerful rendering by the artist in her twenties, this picture was made with a practical purpose; it was painted as a reception piece for admission to the life-drawing course at the National Academy of Design. While Lee Krasner (1908 – 1984) is best known for the personal style that she developed within the movement of Abstract Expressionism in the 19540s, this self portrait (c. 1930) is a rare example of her early work, using the thick brushwork and high color of the Impressionists and Realists of the previous generation. Strikingly, Krasner depicts herself at work in nature. She eyes the viewer, who stands on the spot where, presumably, a mirror hangs on a tree. Her expression and strong handling of light and shade evoke the resolve of a young woman rising to the challenge of her artistic vocation.
Photographed in the Jewish Museum in NYC.
Photo By Gail
Amedeo Modigliani (1884 – 1920) met Jeanne Hébuterne in 1917, when she was 19 and a student in Paris. That same year, they moved into a studio and remained together until their deaths in 1920 (Hébuterne committed suicide the day after Modigliani died of tuberculosis). Hébuterne was the subject of more than 20 portraits that embody the artist’s signature depiction: a dramatically elongated figure with almond-shaped eyes and sensual but firmly closed lips. Hébuterne looks straight ahead, but her eyes are empty, as if caught in a reverie. African masks and early Sienese masters, as well as the concurrent styles of Constantin Brancusi and Pablo Picasso, influenced Modigliani’s work.
Jeanne Hébuterne with Yellow Sweater (1919) was photographed as part of the exhibit, Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in NYC.
Photo By Gail
The best of Alex Katz’s portraits create a palpable tension between specific and abstract, intimate and remote, near and far. This tension animates Katz’s depiction of both people and space. With Red Coat, (1982) an enigmatic portrait of his wife, Ada, the artist takes his cue from movies, photography and adverting; radically cropping and magnifying his wife’s visage, bringing her face to the very front of the picture plane. Yet, despite her proximity to the viewer, Ada’s expression is indecipherable: whatever she might be thinking or feeling remains a mystery. This does nothing to dampen the portrait’s emotional and psychological charge, which derive directly from Ada’s inaccessibility.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.