Alex Katz
(b.1927)
Alex Katz is an internationally recognized artist known primarily for closely cropped stylized portraits of family and friends depicted against minimal monochromatic backgrounds. He draws inspiration from advertising, television, music and poetry. Katz’s paintings are easily identifiable due to their flatness and lack of detail. His goal is to emphasize the beauty of his subjects through use of spartan colors and hints of fashion details. His collaboration with famed choreographer and dancer Paul Taylor in the 1960s spawned an interest in set design, dancers and models. Though he paints people he knows, Katz does not consider it important for the viewer to know the person or story behind the artwork.
Katz was born in New York to Russian émigré parents, both of whom were interested in the arts. He studied at the Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan and the Skowhegan School for Painting in Maine where he was introduced to plein air painting. His work was influenced by Matisse, Picasso and by the Master Japanese woodblock artist Kitagawa Utamaro.
Katz has had over 250 solo exhibitions during his lifetime, including two major retrospectives of his work: the first was at the Whitney in 1986 and the second at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2022. His art may be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in NY; along with numerous international museums, including the Reina Sofia in Spain and the Tate Gallery in London.
Art on Campus
The Black Dress V (Ulla)
Year: 2015
Medium: 31-Color Silkscreen
Edition: 8/35
Location: Rudy Williams Bldg., John Gray Center, Hallway
Gift of Rob Clark and Jerry Thacker
In 1926 fashion designer Coco Chanel created a simple black dress proclaimed by Vogue magazine as a "uniform for all women of taste." The short, elegant LBD has been an iconic wardrobe go-to ever since. In film and TV, the black dress has been a visual showstopper worn by fashionable women from Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) to Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard (1992) to Jessica Paré in Mad Men (2012). Books and articles have been written about the dress, museum shows have revolved around it and celebrated artists such as Alex Katz have painted it.
Katz’s interest in fashion, and particularly the Little Black Dress, has been a recurrent theme in his work since the 1960s. In one of the earliest black dress renditions, he painted his wife Ada depicted in six different poses within a single canvas. He created a series of black dress paintings in 2010, followed by a set of nine silkscreen prints in 2015. In 2018 he recreated the screenprint images as aluminum sculptures.
Ulla is number five in the 2015 series of nine hand-pulled original prints in a small edition of 35. At 80” x 30”, these prints are larger than life and stunning with the contrast of the black dress against a bright yellow background. Though the women have different hair styles and hair coloring, they all have the same pose with right arm raised and left arm across their waist as they lean against the side of the image as though standing in a doorway. The dress styles and shoes vary from image to image to show that every woman can add her own flair to the classic look.
From left to right: Yi, Cecily, Oona, Sharon, Ulla, Yvonne, Carmen, Ruth and Christy