Alex KATZ

Alex Katz – Biography, Screenprints and Original Prints

Alex Katz (born 24 July 1927, Brooklyn, New York) is one of the defining figurative painters of post-war America. He came of age in the 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism ruled New York, and answered it with flat colour, crisp contour and cool, even light: portraits of his wife Ada and of the poets, dancers and painters around him, crowded social scenes, and the woods and water of coastal Maine. Tate calls him one of the most important living American artists of the past half-century. He is equally significant as a printmaker, with some 800 editions to his name – screenprints, lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, aquatints and, latterly, archival pigment prints.

Le Coin des Arts currently offers Sasha 2 (2016), an archival pigment print in colours on Crane Museo Max paper, sheet about 86 × 86 cm, signed in pencil and numbered from an edition of 100 plus artist's proofs, published by Lococo Fine Art, St Louis. It was chosen, like everything we sell, for print quality, condition and provenance – and since a pigment print is not a screenprint or a lithograph, we explain the difference plainly below.

A New York Upbringing and the Cooper Union

The son of Russian immigrants, Katz grew up in Queens. After service in the US Navy he enrolled at the Cooper Union School of Art in Manhattan in 1946, graduating in 1949; as a student he filled sketchbooks with subway passengers. A scholarship took him in 1949 to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where he learnt to paint outdoors from the motif, returning the following summer. Maine has remained his second home: he has spent his summers in Lincolnville since 1954, the year of his first solo exhibition, at the Roko Gallery in New York.

Ada, Cut-outs and 'Cool Painting'

By the mid-1950s Katz had pared his style down to flat figures set against unmodulated grounds. In 1958 he married Ada, a research biologist and Fulbright scholar, who has sat for him more than a thousand times. From 1959 he made cut-outs: painted figures cut from their support and standing free in space. His canvases grew larger and borrowed the scale and cropping of cinema and billboards; his sitters included Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Rauschenberg. He designed sets and costumes for the choreographer Paul Taylor – most famously Polaris (1976) – and sets for the poet Kenneth Koch. In 1977 twenty-three six-metre billboard heads by Katz went up in Times Square. The Albertina in Vienna credits him with inventing 'cool painting', a counterpart to the cool jazz of Miles Davis.

Museums, Maine and the Landscapes

The Whitney Museum of American Art gave Katz his first museum retrospective in 1986, curated by Richard Marshall. In the 1990s landscape took centre stage – leaves, water, shadows, flowers – painted on a scale Katz describes as 'environmental', because the pictures envelop the viewer. In 1996 the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, opened a wing devoted to his work, built around a gift of more than 400 pieces, including a complete set of his prints up to 1993. In 2009 he gave the Albertina almost his entire printed œuvre, some 800 sheets; in 2022 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum mounted the retrospective Alex Katz: Gathering (21 October 2022 – 20 February 2023), and in 2024 he received the US National Medal of Arts.

Alex Katz in Britain: the Serpentine and ARTIST ROOMS

British audiences came to know Katz chiefly through his landscapes. From 2 June to 11 September 2016 the Serpentine Galleries in Kensington Gardens showed Alex Katz: Quick Light, pairing recent landscapes with portraits; outside stood Ada (wind vane) (2016), a working weathervane in the form of one of his cut-outs, and the opening evening included a poetry reading curated by the poet Vincent Katz. Katz is also represented in ARTIST ROOMS, the collection jointly owned by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland. Tate Liverpool drew on it for ARTIST ROOMS: Alex Katz (23 November 2018 – 10 March 2019), nineteen landscape paintings from 1967 to the late 1990s, among them Black Brook (1988). Tate notes that painters such as Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas and Elizabeth Peyton have cited Katz as an influence.

The Prints: Techniques, Publishers and the Albertina Catalogue

Katz tried printmaking in the 1950s – etchings, linocuts, stencils and a three-colour woodcut, Still Life (1953), which he printed himself – then set it aside for about a decade. From 1965, in the wake of Pop, it became central to his work. Screenprinting suited his flat planes; recent editions run to dozens of colours (fifty-one for Christy, 2013). In New York, Simca Print Artists printed and co-published sheets such as Red Coat (1983, edition of 73, in MoMA's collection) and Samantha (1987). He also worked in lithography, often combined with screenprint (Ada Four Times, 1979–80, GHJ Graphics), in aquatint and intaglio, and in photogravure – Coma Berenices (2005), with a poem by John Ashbery, made at Graphicstudio in Tampa. Thaddaeus Ropac's 2024 survey Alex Katz – 60 Years of Printmaking showed how often his prints rework and clarify motifs from the paintings.

The standard reference is the catalogue raisonné prepared by the Albertina: Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Marietta Mautner Markhof and Gunhild Bauer, Alex Katz. Prints. Catalogue Raisonné 1947–2011 (Hatje Cantz, 2011), succeeded by the enlarged second edition by Gunhild Bauer and Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Alex Katz Prints. Catalogue Raisonné 1947–2023 (Hatje Cantz, 2023), which adds some 300 works, with an online supplement on the artist's website. Dealers cite it as 'Schröder 118' or 'S. 731'. The earlier catalogue by Nicholas Maravell, Alex Katz: The Complete Prints (1983), still appears in older descriptions.

Collecting Alex Katz Prints: a Buyer's Guide

Pigment print or screenprint? A screenprint or lithograph is pulled from a matrix – a screen, stone or plate for each colour – worked by artist and printer together. An archival pigment print is an inkjet print in stable pigment inks made from a digital file: there is no hand-worked matrix. What makes it an artist's edition rather than a reproduction is its status: an image approved by Katz, a declared limited edition, pencil signature and number, a named publisher and an entry in the catalogue raisonné (Lococo pigment prints such as the 2021 Flowers portfolio carry Schröder numbers). Judged against the classic definition of an original print, it is a category of its own, and we describe it as such.

Edition. Katz editions typically run from about 50 to 150, plus artist's proofs; Sasha 2 is 100 with proofs marked 'AP'. See the printing.

Signature and stamps. Expect a pencil signature and number; Lococo inkstamps the verso, Simca uses a blindstamp. More on the signature.

Condition. Large flat areas of colour show every scuff, crease or patch of light-staining; check full margins.

Catalogue number. Match title, date, size and edition with Schröder, and check the online supplement for post-2023 editions.

Pitfalls. Offset exhibition posters and magazine plates are reproductions, and unnumbered sheets without a publisher deserve suspicion. See our authenticity guarantee and framing service.

We select Alex Katz prints alongside other masters of the printed image: Roy Lichtenstein, Henri Matisse, whom Tate counts among his sources, Sam Francis, Josef Albers and Adolph Gottlieb. Explore contemporary art and our prints and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Gunhild Bauer and Klaus Albrecht Schröder (eds), Alex Katz Prints. Catalogue Raisonné 1947–2023, Hatje Cantz, 2023 · Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Marietta Mautner Markhof and Gunhild Bauer (eds), Alex Katz. Prints. Catalogue Raisonné 1947–2011, Hatje Cantz, 2011 · Nicholas Maravell, Alex Katz: The Complete Prints, New York, 1983 · Tate – ARTIST ROOMS: Alex Katz · Serpentine – Alex Katz: Quick Light · Alex Katz – Catalogue raisonné · Thaddaeus Ropac – 60 Years of Printmaking · Guggenheim – Alex Katz: Gathering · Encyclopædia Britannica – Alex Katz