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Lot Essay
‘ The ingredients in Katz’s art are always firsthand and immediate, and looking at one of his paintings leaves one with a feeling of reality refreshed.’
– David Salle
Towering almost 2.5 metres in height, Sophie (2003) is a majestic example of Alex Katz’s unmistakable approach to portraiture. The serene face and long, flowing blonde hair of the subject are emphasised by Katz’s daring compositional crop and the unusually tall, slender orientation of the canvas. Warmly lit against a bright white background and wearing a sky-blue shirt that echoes the hue of her eyes, Sophie becomes an almost seraphic presence. A true master of pictorial structure, Katz blends the apparent innocence of his works – flat, clean planes of colour, tranquil and distinctly everyday subject matter – with enormous sophistication. His bold chromatic fields and billboard-scale imagery chime with the bravest innovations in Colour Field, Minimalist and Pop painting while fitting into none of these camps; his deep knowledge of the Old Masters and Impressionists infuses his figures and faces with near-Classical grandeur. In Katz’s hands, the humble and intimate become crystalline, vast and iconic. As Robert Rosenblum has written, ‘What may finally be most remarkable about Katz’s achievement is the way in which he has taken the stuff of daily living and loving we thought suitable only for an uneventful diary entry and transferred it, without a manifesto, to the grand-scale arena of American monumental painting today. Both private and public, modest and profound, these commanding pictures fuse the highest demands of ambitious abstract art with the need to record the quiet truths of personal experience’ (R. Rosenblum, ‘Alex Katz’s American Accent’, Alex Katz, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1986, p. 31).
– David Salle
Towering almost 2.5 metres in height, Sophie (2003) is a majestic example of Alex Katz’s unmistakable approach to portraiture. The serene face and long, flowing blonde hair of the subject are emphasised by Katz’s daring compositional crop and the unusually tall, slender orientation of the canvas. Warmly lit against a bright white background and wearing a sky-blue shirt that echoes the hue of her eyes, Sophie becomes an almost seraphic presence. A true master of pictorial structure, Katz blends the apparent innocence of his works – flat, clean planes of colour, tranquil and distinctly everyday subject matter – with enormous sophistication. His bold chromatic fields and billboard-scale imagery chime with the bravest innovations in Colour Field, Minimalist and Pop painting while fitting into none of these camps; his deep knowledge of the Old Masters and Impressionists infuses his figures and faces with near-Classical grandeur. In Katz’s hands, the humble and intimate become crystalline, vast and iconic. As Robert Rosenblum has written, ‘What may finally be most remarkable about Katz’s achievement is the way in which he has taken the stuff of daily living and loving we thought suitable only for an uneventful diary entry and transferred it, without a manifesto, to the grand-scale arena of American monumental painting today. Both private and public, modest and profound, these commanding pictures fuse the highest demands of ambitious abstract art with the need to record the quiet truths of personal experience’ (R. Rosenblum, ‘Alex Katz’s American Accent’, Alex Katz, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1986, p. 31).