Alex Katz

Most art enthusiasts first associate the name of American painter Alex Katz with the image of large-format, color-intense paintings from which an elegant, well-balanced, almost classical world of seemingly incidental events addresses us. What comes to mind are the formally simple, poster-style portraits, the group portraits of people at the seashore swimming or resting, the depictions of summerly garden parties and of ballet scenes with their film-still-like sequences of movements. At times, the enormous landscape paintings, in which lights plays a creative, structural role, proves just as memorable. Although rich in visual effects, Alex Katz's world is a gentle one; his work also demonstrates connections to American coolness, that reserved and emotionless, usually representational style of painting characterized mainly by clear forms and perfect style. Located outside Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and programmatic realism, Alex Katz's paintings occupy a peculiar, original position that oscillates between these poles, a position to which his paintings also owe their popularity.

Zdenek Felix, excerpted from Style and Elegance in Alex Katz: Prints.

  

FORTHCOMING & NEW RELEASES

ALEX KATZ: FACE THE MUSIC
GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC
U.S. $30.00 | CAN $30
ISBN: 9783901935442 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 3/31/2012 | In stock

ALEX KATZ: MAINE, NEW YORK
CHARTA / COLBY COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART
U.S. $45.00 | CAN $45
ISBN: 9788881588305 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 6/30/2012 | In stock

  

PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED

INVENTED SYMBOLS
CHARTA/COLBY COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART
U.S. $29.95 | CAN $29.95
ISBN: 9788881588404 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 9/30/2012 | Awaiting stock

                         

ACTIVE BACKLIST

ALEX KATZ: PRINTS AND WORKS IN EDITIONS 1947-2010
HATJE CANTZ
U.S. $150.00 | CAN $150
ISBN: 9783775727662 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 11/30/2011 | In stock

ALEX KATZ: PRINTS
HATJE CANTZ
U.S. $60.00 | CAN $60
ISBN: 9783775725859 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 11/30/2010 | In stock

ALEX KATZ: AN AMERICAN WAY OF SEEING
KERBER
U.S. $55.00 | CAN $55
ISBN: 9783866782631 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 6/30/2010 | In stock

ALEX KATZ: SEEING, DRAWING, MAKING
WINDSOR PRESS
U.S. $45.00 | CAN $45
ISBN: 9780974611648 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 12/1/2008 | Awaiting stock

ALEX KATZ: FACES AND NAMES
JRP|RINGIER
U.S. $15.00 | CAN $15
ISBN: 9783905770797 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 4/1/2008 | Awaiting stock

ALEX KATZ: NEW YORK
CHARTA / IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
U.S. $45.00 | CAN $45
ISBN: 9788881586349 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 8/1/2007 | In stock

ALEX KATZ: THE SIXTIES
CHARTA
U.S. $34.95 | CAN $34.95
ISBN: 9788881585939 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 9/15/2006 | Awaiting stock

ALEX KATZ: COLLAGES
COLBY COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART, WATERVILLE, MAINE
U.S. $45.00 | CAN $45
ISBN: 9780972848459 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 2/1/2006 | Awaiting stock

ALEX KATZ IN MAINE
CHARTA/FARNSWORTH ART MUSEUM
U.S. $45.00 | CAN $45
ISBN: 9788881585083 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 7/15/2005 | Awaiting stock

ALEX KATZ: FIRST SIGHT
PETER BLUM EDITION
U.S. $165.00 | CAN $165
ISBN: 9780935875201 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 9/2/2003 | In stock

ALEX KATZ: THE WOODCUTS AND LINOCUTS 1951-2001
PETER BLUM EDITION
U.S. $30.00 | CAN $30
ISBN: 9780935875195 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 1/2/2002 | Awaiting stock

ALEX KATZ
GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC
U.S. $25.00 | CAN $25
ISBN: 9783901935077 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 4/2/2003 | Awaiting stock

ALEX KATZ & ROBERT CREELEY: EDGES
PETER BLUM EDITION
U.S. $50.00 | CAN $50
ISBN: 9780935875171 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 7/2/1999 | In stock

          

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

ALEX KATZ: CUTOUTS
HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS
U.S. $29.80 | CAN $29.8
ISBN: 9783775713047 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 7/2/2003 | Not available

ALEX KATZ
HOPEFULMONSTER
U.S. $45.00 | CAN $45
ISBN: 9788877571038 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 5/2/2000 | Not available

ALEX KATZ
MARLBOROUGH GALLERY
U.S. $75.00 | CAN $75
ISBN: 9780897971591 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 3/2/2000 | Not available

ALEX KATZ
GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC
U.S. $25.00 | CAN $25
ISBN: 9783901935008 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 4/2/1999 | Not available

ALEX KATZ: RECENT PAINTINGS
MARLBOROUGH GALLERY
U.S. $35.00 | CAN $35
ISBN: 9780897971157 | TRADE
PUB DATE: 8/2/1996 | Not available

Alex Katz

Alex Katz: Maine, New York

Text by Carter Ratcliff. Interview by Sharon Corwin.
Published by Charta / Colby College Museum of Art

Maine/New York surveys three decades of paintings by Alex Katz (born 1927). A quintessential New York artist, Katz is also a part-time resident of rural Maine, and the subject matter of his paintings accordingly shifts from landscape to cityscape, from rural vignette to Manhattan interior. In this volume, published for an exhibition at Colby College Museum of Art--where the largest public collection of Katz’s resides--the pleasant haze of city afternoons is juxtaposed with the flickering greens of a rural path; the buzz of a fashionable social occasion with the dusk as it descends on a pond in the Maine woods. Along the way, we encounter the family members and friends who populate Katz’s paintings, cast in his distinctive treatments of light and atmosphere.

ALEX KATZ: MAINE, NEW YORK
$45.00 | In Stock: Order now or contact your local bookstore or museum shop.

Alex Katz: Face the Music

Edited by Arne Ehmann. Introduction by Charles L. Reinhart. Text by Mark Rappolt.
Published by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

In 1960, Alex Katz (born 1927) began to collaborate with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, commencing a relationship with dance that has spanned his entire career. Undertaken for the company’s performance of The Red Room (later known as Post Meridian) at the legendary Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Katz’s contribution consisted of three enormous red panels that defined the stage, and round wooden discs capable of holding two dancers, which floated down from the top of the theater rafters. During the collaboration, Katz also made numerous portraits of both dancers and dances. Katz and Taylor collaborated again in the 1980s, but the painter has only recently returned to the depiction of dance, with a new series of portraits of leading figures in the New York dance scene. Alex Katz: Face the Music surveys Katz’s career-long involvement with dance, reproducing canvases, cartoons, drawings and studies in oil.

ALEX KATZ: FACE THE MUSIC
$30.00 | In Stock: Order now or contact your local bookstore or museum shop.

Alex Katz: Prints and Works in Editions 1947-2010

Catalogue Raisonné

Published by Hatje Cantz

Alex Katz's clear planes of color and simplicity of line are famously well suited to printmaking. For Katz himself, the medium also holds the appeal of distributing his work in greater quantity. His embrace of printmaking was consolidated in the mid-1960s, and led to a voracious exploration of print technologies, including the latest state-of-the-art reproduction processes. Each of these elicits different qualities from Katz's artistic vocabulary: woodcut, for example, yields an emotional tenor not commonly seen elsewhere in his oeuvre, as the traces left by chisel and burn are left legible and accepted by the artist. However, the primary effect of Katz's prints is to enhance his art as a coolly Baudelairean “painting of modern life.” Though he frequently works with professional printing companies, Katz often undertakes the full run of manual labor himself. This volume assesses Katz's history with printmaking and editions, including collaborations with writers.

ALEX KATZ: PRINTS AND WORKS IN EDITIONS 1947-2010
$150.00 | In Stock: Order now or contact your local bookstore or museum shop.

Alex Katz: Prints

Edited by Klaus Albrecht Schröder. Text by Felix Zdenek, Marietta Mautner Markhof, Werner Spies.
Published by Hatje Cantz

Alex Katz (born 1927) is best known as a painter--specifically, as a painter of his family and his distinguished circle of friends, including poets, writers and artists. In the early 1950s, he began experimenting with printmaking, but it was not until the mid 1960s that he intensified his interest and production in the medium. Pushing at the limits of various printing techniques, Katz tested out pictorial ideas first conceived for his paintings, retaining planes of matte color but further simplifying his forms and dramatically cropping his images. These reduced compositions were wonderfully compatible with the graphic clarity of printmaking, and by effectively translating his paintings into prints, the artist achieved what he called the "final synthesis of painting." This publication provides insight into an often-neglected yet vital aspect of Katz's work, from the early 1950s to the present day.

ALEX KATZ: PRINTS
$60.00 | In Stock: Order now or contact your local bookstore or museum shop.

Alex Katz: An American Way of Seeing

Text by Roland Mönig, Guy Tosatto, Timo Valjakka, Eric de Chassey.
Published by Kerber

Alex Katz (born 1927) has become a leading chronicler of modern life in America, a model and forerunner to several schools of painting that came after him. Portraying in deadpan style the faces of New York and its environs since the 1950s, when he was a part of the later Cedar Tavern scene, Katz makes everyday enigmas of people, at once emptying them of meaning and bestowing upon them specific character and specific roles in life. Some of these faces may be familiar (poets Allen Ginsberg and Ted Berrigan), others equally striking simply add to Katz's sense of modern life as a parade or a pageant. An American Way of Seeing surveys work from 1968 onwards, from paintings to cutouts and multi-panel works. The more recent paintings reproduced herein convey new hints of lyricism, in their depiction of reflections in water and mute night-time scenes.

ALEX KATZ: AN AMERICAN WAY OF SEEING
$55.00 | In Stock: Order now or contact your local bookstore or museum shop.

Alex Katz: New York

Foreword by Enrique Juncosa. Text by Juan Manuel Bonet. Interview by Rachael Thomas.
Published by Charta / Irish Museum of Modern Art

New York brings together painter Alex Katz's most striking images of his hometown and the dear friends with which he made it his own. Coming of age during the triumph of the New York School of painting, Katz synthesized its influences with wide-ranging interests shared by many of the New York School poets. Of the more than 40 paintings and aquatints gathered here, many depict that distinguished circle, as well as the iconic skyline where they changed the world. Katz is best known as a painter of people, and the wide cross-section of portraits here demonstrates the variety he brings to the genre, along with dramatic variations in scale, abrupt cropping and subtle artifices such as luxuriant backdrops that turn out to be earlier Katz paintings. Along with an essay and interview, New York includes an extraordinary selection of poems from friends of the artist, including some of the most important American poets of the late twentieth century, among them Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and Robert Creeley. Katz was born in Brooklyn in 1927 and studied at the Cooper Union and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been the subject of nearly 200 international solo exhibitions.

ALEX KATZ: NEW YORK
$45.00 | In Stock: Order now or contact your local bookstore or museum shop.

Alex Katz: First Sight

Essay by Jean-Christophe Ammann.
Published by Peter Blum Edition

In the more than 500 working drawings by Alex Katz reproduced here, we are able to look over the artist's shoulder at works in their nascent state--a rare experience essential to any understanding of the artist's oeuvre. Like a sculptor's preparatory drawings, these are the sketches of a painter who is not a draftsman but a painter; they are the raw material, revealing Katz's methods of looking and recording. Contours, overlappings, movements and attitudes are put to paper ever so quickly, with observation given top priority. Subject development, composition and memory are all elements that come about afterwards, when the artist takes up the paintbrush and moves to the canvas. First Sight contains a vast array of previously unpublished sketches and drawings, printed here in facsimile, at a scale of 1:1, and spanning the entire career of the artist, from 1950 to the present. The book is a limited edition of 1000 copies.

ALEX KATZ: FIRST SIGHT
$165.00 | In Stock: Order now or contact your local bookstore or museum shop.

Alex Katz & Robert Creeley: Edges

By Robert Creeley. Artwork by Alex Katz. Text by Merlin James.
Published by Peter Blum Edition

Continuing Alex Katz's practice of collaborations with poets, Edges features reproductions of 13 etchings by Katz alongside the poem “Edges” by the great American poet Robert Creeley. In addition, the volume includes a tipped-in color plate, two full-color spreads, a black-and-white photograph of the artist and poet and an essay by the artist and author Merlin James.

ALEX KATZ & ROBERT CREELEY: EDGES
$50.00 | In Stock: Order now or contact your local bookstore or museum shop.