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Lot Essay
Painted in 2003, Sophie is a regal, urbane portrait by Alex Katz. Closely cropped against an enigmatic ground, Katz’s sitter possesses an undeniable poise. Long cascades of brown hair frame her elegant visage, warmly illuminated by soft lighting. Katz is a colourist par excellence, and the blue of his sitter’s eyes is crystal-clear. This, in combination with the work’s tranquil atmosphere, lends Katz’s subject an almost angelic grace: with her simple dress, bare face, and flowing hair, Sophie recalls a Renaissance divinity. Katz has always been a student of art history, having taught himself early on the Old Master technique of making cartoons before embarking on a canvas; he considers Goya, Manet, Matisse, and the ancient Egyptian sculptor Thutmose to be among his most enduring influences.
Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Katz came of age in an art world devoted to brash, abstracted gestures and Action Painting. In deference to the avant-garde movements of the era, he took seriously their tenets and scale, and developed an interest in flat space and heightened colour. Yet Katz was unable to give himself over to abstraction and never strayed from figuration. Instead, he challenged himself to faithfully represent reality even as he remained truthful to his medium and its thrilling, two-dimensional constraints. ‘I can’t think of anything more exciting than the surface of things,’ he has said (A. Katz quoted in I. Sandler, Alex Katz: A Retrospective, New York 1998, p. 24). Looking to Matisse and Rothko in particular, Katz used colour to achieve depth and volume without eschewing representational imagery. His art, as such, suggests less a photographic reality than how the artist himself sees and experiences the world around him.
By employing close-ups and cropped viewpoints, Katz imbues his paintings with a sense of drama even as his subjects remain tantalisingly out of reach. Over his long and prolific career, Katz has honed this pictorial aloofness, citing ‘detachment’ as a preferred aesthetic quality (A. Katz quoted in A. Heiss, ‘Faster than Thought’, in Alex Katz Under the Stars: American Landscape 1951-1995, exh. cat. P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York 1996, p. 27). Sophie contains the hallmarks of his painting: refined sophistication, gorgeous tonalities and a certain sangfroid. For more than seven decades, Katz has stayed loyal to his idiom, a dedication celebrated in his recent retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2022. While his formal strategies evince a Pop aesthetic, what unites all Katz’s oeuvre—and is so evident in Sophie—is the paramount importance of style. His paintings are true to their own moment, which, as Katz told the critic David Sylvester, is the point: ‘…this is the highest thing an artist can do—to make something that’s real for his time, where he lives’ (A. Katz interviewed by D. Sylvester, 15-16 March 1997).
Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Katz came of age in an art world devoted to brash, abstracted gestures and Action Painting. In deference to the avant-garde movements of the era, he took seriously their tenets and scale, and developed an interest in flat space and heightened colour. Yet Katz was unable to give himself over to abstraction and never strayed from figuration. Instead, he challenged himself to faithfully represent reality even as he remained truthful to his medium and its thrilling, two-dimensional constraints. ‘I can’t think of anything more exciting than the surface of things,’ he has said (A. Katz quoted in I. Sandler, Alex Katz: A Retrospective, New York 1998, p. 24). Looking to Matisse and Rothko in particular, Katz used colour to achieve depth and volume without eschewing representational imagery. His art, as such, suggests less a photographic reality than how the artist himself sees and experiences the world around him.
By employing close-ups and cropped viewpoints, Katz imbues his paintings with a sense of drama even as his subjects remain tantalisingly out of reach. Over his long and prolific career, Katz has honed this pictorial aloofness, citing ‘detachment’ as a preferred aesthetic quality (A. Katz quoted in A. Heiss, ‘Faster than Thought’, in Alex Katz Under the Stars: American Landscape 1951-1995, exh. cat. P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York 1996, p. 27). Sophie contains the hallmarks of his painting: refined sophistication, gorgeous tonalities and a certain sangfroid. For more than seven decades, Katz has stayed loyal to his idiom, a dedication celebrated in his recent retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2022. While his formal strategies evince a Pop aesthetic, what unites all Katz’s oeuvre—and is so evident in Sophie—is the paramount importance of style. His paintings are true to their own moment, which, as Katz told the critic David Sylvester, is the point: ‘…this is the highest thing an artist can do—to make something that’s real for his time, where he lives’ (A. Katz interviewed by D. Sylvester, 15-16 March 1997).