.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Alex Katz’s Red Hat (Nicole) is a triumphant addition to the artist’s celebrated body of portraiture. One of the greatest and most influential living painters, Katz’s career is defined, since his emergence in the late ‘50s, by powerful and sure-handed portrayals of women. Here, his steely, blue-eyed subject stares out at the viewer; her tall, red hat and straight grey hair contrasts sharply with the inky black background. Her pursed lips suggest impending speech and a degree of comfort between painter and sitter. Likewise, her polka-dotted scarf and elegant, feathery hair imply wealth and refinement both in their exquisite patterning and in Katz’s sensitive renderings thereof. Indeed, Katz has always veered toward the austerely glamorous in his portraits, typically favoring friends, loved ones and celebrities in fine garments. Red Hat (Nicole), a powerful example of Katz’s mature work, finds the artist playing firmly to his artistic strengths while at the same time pushing the envelope and innovating within a familiar and reliable art-historical trope: the femme au chapeau.
This motif, used by artists from Vermeer to Picasso, is recurrent in the long history of painting. Millinery, with their often dramatic lines and shadow-casting brims, enables the painter to explore form and light while affording the sitter a more fully realized visual identity. Katz, for his part, uses the hat to tie together an entire series, in which each sitter wears the bright, titular red hat. Innovative for its serialization of the inherently unique face, Katz’s Red Hat series investigates the signifiers of identity and the broader notions of a portrait’s supposed goal of realizing a distinctive likeness. Unlike other great portraitists, Katz essentializes his subject, preferring flat, graphic signifiers over photorealist flashiness. The red hat, in the context of the series, borders on the surreal, probing, and perhaps questioning, the romanticized relationship between sitter and painter.
Katz’s singular influence on the portraiture of the last fifty years cannot be overstated, with his shadow looming large over the genre. Combining the cool, detached ethos of pop with a more classical handling of light and space, Katz’s style is both firmly contemporary and visually timeless. Here, he uses a traditional understanding of light and shadow, combined and juxtaposed with a distinctly post-Warhol handling of composition and size, inviting the viewer to approach, while also looming dramatically over him or her. The subject’s stylized symmetry renders her nearly abstract -- a series of colorful and patterned passages that coalesce into a single, highly legible image. When seen up close, Red Hat (Nicole) brilliantly reflects Katz’s knack for building a surface piece by piece, with each broad passage of color constituting its own territory. This highly sectional style is more typical of Katz’s later period than his earlier, more painterly efforts. This slight shift represents a maturation in the artist’s style, and casts Red Hat (Nicole) as an essential piece of Alex Katz’s critically lauded output of the last decade and, by extension, his staggeringly productive and important six-decade career.
This motif, used by artists from Vermeer to Picasso, is recurrent in the long history of painting. Millinery, with their often dramatic lines and shadow-casting brims, enables the painter to explore form and light while affording the sitter a more fully realized visual identity. Katz, for his part, uses the hat to tie together an entire series, in which each sitter wears the bright, titular red hat. Innovative for its serialization of the inherently unique face, Katz’s Red Hat series investigates the signifiers of identity and the broader notions of a portrait’s supposed goal of realizing a distinctive likeness. Unlike other great portraitists, Katz essentializes his subject, preferring flat, graphic signifiers over photorealist flashiness. The red hat, in the context of the series, borders on the surreal, probing, and perhaps questioning, the romanticized relationship between sitter and painter.
Katz’s singular influence on the portraiture of the last fifty years cannot be overstated, with his shadow looming large over the genre. Combining the cool, detached ethos of pop with a more classical handling of light and space, Katz’s style is both firmly contemporary and visually timeless. Here, he uses a traditional understanding of light and shadow, combined and juxtaposed with a distinctly post-Warhol handling of composition and size, inviting the viewer to approach, while also looming dramatically over him or her. The subject’s stylized symmetry renders her nearly abstract -- a series of colorful and patterned passages that coalesce into a single, highly legible image. When seen up close, Red Hat (Nicole) brilliantly reflects Katz’s knack for building a surface piece by piece, with each broad passage of color constituting its own territory. This highly sectional style is more typical of Katz’s later period than his earlier, more painterly efforts. This slight shift represents a maturation in the artist’s style, and casts Red Hat (Nicole) as an essential piece of Alex Katz’s critically lauded output of the last decade and, by extension, his staggeringly productive and important six-decade career.