Alex Katz's long-standing fascination with dance and collaborations with renowned playwrights and choreographers yielded some of his most complex compositions.

Since Alex Katz first painted the Paul Taylor in 1959, he has invited dancers to model for him. Dance, according to the artist, belongs to the same “long tradition of gestures” as painting. This publication is the first to examine the many decades of Katz’s work for the stage, including the ways that he introduced tenets of postwar painting into theater and dance aesthetics.

“I’d never seen anything like it,” Katz recalls of his first encounter with the work of dancer and choreographer Paul Taylor. The two partnered on fifteen productions for which Katz innovated with flat lighting, humorous obstacles, and framing mechanisms. His involvement with Paul Taylor led to collaborations with other companies including Yoshiko Chuma, Laura Dean, William Dunas, and Parsons.

Among Katz’s most celebrated sets is the ensemble of cutouts he created for Kenneth Koch’s 1961 production, George Washington Crossing the Delaware. Katz heightened the absurdity of the Revolutionary War-inspired play with Pop-adjacent figures and props. This publication brings together paintings, sketches, costumes, photographs, film stills, and ephemera. Newly-commissioned essays, unpublished materials, and major paintings will provide an overview of Katz's working relationships with individual choreographers and shed new light on avant-garde collaborations in New York between the 1960s and 80s.

About the Authors:

Diana Tuite served as the Katz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine. Charles L. Reinhart served as the longtime director of the American Dance Festival. David Salle is an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer. Jennifer Tipton is an award-winning American lighting designer. Robert Storr is an American curator, critic, painter, and writer. Jacqueline Terrassa is the Carolyn Muzzy Director of the Colby College Museum of Art.

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Пролистать книгу Alex Katz: Theater & Dance

Before the rise of Pop Art proper, Alex Katz developed an iconic style of figurative painting in the early 1960s ―  influenced by film, television, and billboard advertising. Seemingly detached and incredibly stylish, he created portraits of the New York scene as well as idyllic landscapes. Printmaking plays an equally central role in Katz’s work. He uses lithographs, etchings, silkscreens, woodcuts and linocuts to reproduce, reflect and further reduce his bold aesthetic, while retaining the radiant color characteristic for his paintings. Since the first edition in 2011, Katz has almost doubled his output of prints ― this timely new edition includes his complete prints, cutout editions, artists’ books, and also lists his works of applied art like book illustrations and public art projects.

New essays and interviews with the artist give profound insights into the work of one of the foremost American artists of the present.

About the Author:

When Alex Katz (*1927, New York City) began his artistic career in the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was the reigning style. Ahead of his time, he created stylized portraits against flat, monochrome backgrounds. From 1965 onwards, he embarked on a prolific career in printmaking, exhausting all possibilities: from traditional craftsmanship to state-of-the-art reproduction processes.