Alex Katz | Park Avenue Departure | 2019

Photo by: Kevin J. Miyazaki / Sculpture Milwaukee

American artist Alex Katz has been active in the art world since the late 1940s. He came of age at the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, animated by a group of émigrés and war veterans scarred by the war, along with recent university grads inspired by philosophy, psychoanalysis, and formal aesthetic considerations. Yet Katz’s clean, flat paintings focused on Madison Avenue and popular culture, pre-dating similar Pop works by fellow artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein by several years. Katz embodies the false dichotomy between figuration and abstraction since he merges the two seamlessly. He is primarily known for his twisting of two well-established artist genres: portraiture and landscape. Park Avenue Departure is a very flat two-sided sculpture that has the profile of a sign. 

We see Katz’s life-long muse and model, wife Ada, dressed in a beach-worthy slouchy ensemble, her head protected from the sun. The patches of unmatched color on her tan pants and black shirt suggest light reflected off pavement or a passing car, embedding the figure in her surroundings. The lack of narrative— is she waiting for a friend, has she be left behind?—leave us slightly uneasy about the figure. Viewers perceive the figure like a Cubist puzzle that falls apart and reassembles itself as we walk around the work.

Katz began producing cut-outs in 1959, first on wood then later on aluminum, depicting characters from his New York milieu of artists, poets and friends. The works are only partially about factual representation of real people, concerned more with formal shapes and textures of surface. We do not see Ada’s face in Park Avenue Departure, the artist refusing us any insight into this particular figure. Katz has said his interests are “light, clothes, people,” and this work synthesizes all three.

Since 1951 Katz has been the subject of over 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions.