Alex Katz, Alex Katz in Maine (hand signed and dated by Alex Katz), 2005

Alex Katz

Alex Katz in Maine (hand signed and dated by Alex Katz), 2005

Hardback monograph (hand signed and dated by Alex Katz)

Boldly signed and dated 6.9.10 by Alex Katz on the first front end page

9 3/4 × 11 1/2 × 3/4 inches

Unframed

This lavishly illustrated 2005 hardcover monograph with dust jacket was hand signed and dated in 2010 for the present owner on the first front end page. It makes an excellent gift.

Book information:
Publisher: Farnsworth Art Museum, Maine (July 15, 2005)
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 112 pages - with 84 illustrations, including 72 colorplates

Publisher's blurb:
Alex Katz is one of the most influential painters of our era. Having come of age in the 1950s alongside the New York School of painters and poets, he has impacted generations of artists
with his iconic images. Best known for his emotionally ambiguous and psychologically complex portraits of cosmopolitan friends and colleagues from the New York art world, he is also
admired for his bold, transcendent landscape paintings and his coolly intimate portraits of friends and family-often painted in Maine, where Katz has summered since 1954. Many of Katz's most poetic, melancholy and slyly humorous works have their settings in or near Lincolnville, Maine, and are reproduced here in conjunction with the Farnsworth Art Museum's summer 2005 exhibition. The topic of Maine in Katz's work is examined in depth for the first time, in an essay by art critic Sanford Schwartz. Also included are texts by Suzette McAvoy, the exhibition's curator, and Vincent Katz, the artist's son.

More about Alex Katz:
Across eight decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) has sought to capture visual experience in the present tense. “Eternity exists in minutes of absolute awareness,” Katz stated in 1961. “Painting, when successful, seems to be a synthetic reflection of this condition.” Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of “quick things passing,” compressing the flux of everyday life into a vivid burst of optical perception.
Emerging as an artist in the mid-20th century, Katz forged a mode of figurative painting that fused the energy of Abstract Expressionist canvases with the American vernaculars of the magazine, billboard, and movie screen. Throughout his practice, he has turned to his surroundings in downtown New York City and coastal Maine as his primary subject matter, documenting an evolving community of poets, artists, critics, dancers, and filmmakers who have animated the cultural avant-garde from the postwar period to the present.
Staged in the city where Katz has lived and worked his entire life, and prepared with the close collaboration of the artist, this retrospective filled the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda. Encompassing paintings, oil sketches, collages, drawings, prints, and freestanding “cutout” works, the exhibition began with the artist’s intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway from the late 1940s and culminated in the rapturous, immersive landscapes that have dominated his output in recent years.

Courtesy of The Guggenheim Museum