About Alex Katz

  • Biography

    The son of Russian immigrants, Alex Katz was born July 24, 1927 in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Queens in a liberal, Bohemian setting. He is a figure painter of realistic portraits of friends and family, and his figures are usually relaxed close-ups from a frontal perspective and appear in a flattened manner. With his artwork, he strives to convey the feeling that it is good to be alive. It has been said that his style highly influenced the popularity of New Realism in the 1970s. Along with his associates Al Held and Philip Pearlstein, and others who were struggling against the 'titanic presences of Pollock and de Kooning' and other abstract expressionists.

    Katz studied three years (1946-49) at Cooper...

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