American Dance Festival 1987

Alex Katz (b. 1927) is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, probably most known for his figurative and portraiture work done in a flat, simplified style. Alex Katz was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, later growing up in Queens, as the son of an immigrant who had lost a factory he owned in Russia to the Soviet revolution. Katz studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Skowhegan exposed him to painting from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today. Katz explains that Skowhegan's plein air painting gave him "a reason to devote my life to painting." Every year from early June to mid-September, Katz moves from his SoHo loft to a 19th-century clapboard farmhouse in Lincolnville, Maine. His paintings are defined by their flatness of color and form, their economy of line, and their cool but seductive emotional detachment.