Alex KATZ

Alex Katz (b. 1927): Biography and Fine Art Prints for Collectors

Alex Katz was born on July 24, 1927, in Brooklyn, grew up in Queens and has worked in New York his whole life. He is the painter who brought figuration back into the room when Abstract Expressionism owned it: big, flat, cool pictures of his wife Ada, the New York School poets, dancers, cocktail parties, and the light on the Maine coast. He is also one of the most prolific American printmakers of his generation, with roughly 800 editions – screenprints, lithographs, woodcuts, aquatints, photogravures and, more recently, archival pigment prints.

Right now Le Coin des Arts has one Katz in stock: Sasha 2 (2016), an archival pigment print in color on Crane Museo Max paper, about 34 × 34 inches, signed in pencil and numbered from an edition of 100 (plus artist's proofs), published by Lococo Fine Art in St. Louis, Missouri. We chose it for print quality, condition and provenance. Because a pigment print is a different animal from a screenprint or a lithograph, we spell out exactly what you are buying below.

Navy, Cooper Union and Skowhegan

Katz's parents were Russian immigrants. After a stint in the Navy, he enrolled at the Cooper Union School of Art in 1946 and graduated in 1949, sketching subway riders along the way. A scholarship sent him in 1949 to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where he learned to paint outdoors, fast, from life. He went back the next summer, and he has summered in Lincolnville, Maine, since 1954 – the same year he had his first solo show, at the Roko Gallery in New York.

Flat Color, Ada and the Cutouts

By the mid-1950s Katz had stripped his figures down to flat shapes on plain grounds. He married Ada, a research biologist and Fulbright scholar, in 1958; he has painted her more than a thousand times. In 1959 he started making cutouts – painted figures cut free of the canvas and set up in space. The paintings got bigger and borrowed the close-ups and cropping of movies and billboards. His sitters read like a roll call of downtown New York: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Taylor, Meredith Monk. For choreographer Paul Taylor he designed sets and costumes over several decades, including Polaris (1976). In 1977 he put twenty-three giant portrait heads on billboards in Times Square.

From the Whitney to the Guggenheim Rotunda

The Whitney Museum of American Art gave Katz his first museum retrospective in 1986, curated by Richard Marshall. Two years later the Brooklyn Museum showed Alex Katz, A Print Retrospective (January 15 – April 11, 1988): 63 prints from the early 1950s on, organized by Barry Walker. In 1996 the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, opened a 10,000-square-foot wing for his work, designed by Max Gordon and funded in part by trustee Paul Schupf; Katz gave more than 400 pieces, including a complete set of his prints through 1993, and Colby had already given him an honorary doctorate in 1984. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum then filled its rotunda with Alex Katz: Gathering (October 21, 2022 – February 20, 2023), curated by Katherine Brinson – eight decades of paintings, cutouts and prints, with the Paul Taylor Dance Company performing Polaris. The title came from "Salute," a 1951 poem by Katz's friend James Schuyler. In 2024 MoMA showed four of his monumental paintings, and that October President Biden presented him with the National Medal of Arts.

Alex Katz Prints: Simca, Graphicstudio and Lococo

Katz made a few etchings, linocuts and stencil prints in the 1950s, plus a three-color woodcut, Still Life (1953), that he printed himself. He came back to printmaking around 1965, as Pop made mechanical reproduction respectable, and never left. Screenprinting fit his flat color like a glove. New York's Simca Print Artists printed and co-published classics such as Red Coat (1983, edition of 73; MoMA owns impression 24/73) and Samantha (1987). He combined lithography with screenprint in Ada Four Times (1979–80, GHJ Graphics), and at Graphicstudio in Tampa he made Coma Berenices (2005), eleven photogravures with a poem by John Ashbery. Recent screenprints can run to fifty-one colors (Christy, 2013). Katz has said that prints are more "stabilized" than his paintings, and he often uses them to rethink a motif he first painted. Since the 2010s, Lococo Fine Art in St. Louis has published his archival pigment prints – Sasha 2 (2016), the Flowers portfolio (2021) and others.

The catalog raisonné comes from Vienna's Albertina: Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Marietta Mautner Markhof and Gunhild Bauer, Alex Katz. Prints. Catalogue Raisonné 1947–2011 (Hatje Cantz, 2011), expanded by about 300 works in Gunhild Bauer and Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Alex Katz Prints. Catalogue Raisonné 1947–2023 (Hatje Cantz, 2023), plus an online supplement on alexkatz.com. Auction houses cite it as "Schröder 118" or "S. 731" (the Phillips reference for Azaleas on Yellow from Flowers). The first catalog, Nicholas Maravell's Alex Katz: The Complete Prints (New York, 1983), still turns up in older listings.

How to Buy an Alex Katz Print

Know what a pigment print is. A screenprint or lithograph is printed from a physical matrix – one screen, stone or plate per color – that the artist and printer work on together. An archival pigment print is an inkjet print, made with lightfast pigment inks from a digital file. There is no hand-made matrix. It counts as an artist's edition, not a reproduction, because Katz approved the image, the edition is limited and declared, each sheet is signed and numbered in pencil, the publisher is named, and the edition is listed in the catalog raisonné. By the traditional definition of an original print, though, it is its own category, and we label it that way.

Check the edition. Katz editions usually run from about 50 to 150, plus artist's proofs. Sasha 2 is 100, with proofs marked "AP." See the printing process.

Look for the stamps. Pencil signature and number, plus a publisher's inkstamp on the back (Lococo) or a blindstamp (Simca). More on the signature.

Inspect the surface. Those big fields of flat color show every scuff, dent and fade. Ask for full margins.

Know the market. At Sotheby's, impressions of Sasha 2 were estimated at $5,000–7,000 in 2020 and 2021; Simca screenprints like Samantha have sold higher.

Avoid the traps. Offset posters and magazine plates are reproductions; unnumbered sheets with no publisher are a red flag. See our authenticity guarantee and framing options.

We pick Alex Katz prints alongside other great American and modern printmakers: Roy Lichtenstein, Sam Francis, Adolph Gottlieb, Josef Albers and Henri Matisse. Browse contemporary art or all our fine art prints and lithographs.

Sources and References

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, Alpine Fine Arts Collection, New York, 1983 · Guggenheim – Alex Katz: Gathering · Whitney Museum – Alex Katz, 1986 · Brooklyn Museum – A Print Retrospective · MoMA – Red Coat, 1983 · Colby College Museum of Art · Colby – National Medal of Arts · Sotheby's – Sasha 2