The prolific American painter, sculptor, and printmaker Alex Katz, now nearly 100 years old, has had a long and distinguished career creating primarily figurative and landscape works. Acknowledging in an interview with fellow artist David Salle on the occasion of a 2012-2013 exhibition of his works in Vienna that, “I don’t like narratives, basically,” Katz’s distinctive, clean-edged style features skillful distillations of his subjects into simplified forms rendered in broad, boldly-lit planes of flat, rich color. His striking images, which are often large in scale, typically appear to be both stylized and realistic, and regularly feature neutral backgrounds. Even so, beneath the semi-minimalist, Pop Art, and billboard-type veneer of his recognizable working style, is the fact that most of Katz’s figurative works are portraits of people he knows (such as his wife Ada), and his landscape views and details typically depict (as in the print offered here), features of locations that are most familiar to him.

Born in Brooklyn in 1927 and then raised in Queens, Katz’s first formal artistic training was at the nearby Cooper Union in Manhattan. By 22, he had shifted his studies to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. In addition to forming a lasting appreciation for the beauty and tranquility of that northern state (where he soon purchased a summer house), it was during this period of his training that Katz was introduced to the plein air painting technique. Exposing him to the idea of working out-of-doors, in nature, and thereby essentially distancing him from the influence of his studio-based, Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art peers of the early 1950s, this technique proved pivotal to Katz’s lifelong appreciation for light, space, and place.

Throughout his already 70-plus-year career, Katz’s hundreds of original prints (done in everything from etching to aquatint, lithography, screenprint, and linocut) have been as essential to his artistic efforts and worldwide recognition as his paintings. As described by Vivien Bittencourt as part of her essay in the copy of the catalogue raisonne of Katz’s prints (1947-2011) that is included with this lot, “… printmaking is often the final step in the development of an image. When he gets an initial idea for an artwork, he may first make an ink sketch, oil-on-board studies, and charcoal-on-paper drawings, which then lead to a large-scale cartoon that he uses to finalize the composition and transfer it to the linen on which he paints a painting. ‘I want to make a print from what they used to call a universal image,’ Katz has commented, ‘one that means more to more people. Prints help to expand the art world [and] make it more accessible.’ ”

It is significant that out of the more than 500 different prints by Katz described within the above-mentioned catalogue raisonne, it is his 1989 “Black Brook,” as offered here, that the publishers chose for the cover of their book. With it bold colors and a horizon line somewhere beyond the borders of the image (reminiscent of Claude Monet’s water lilies paintings), this masterful blend of aquatint and lithography is also interesting as it depicts a place very dear to the artist’s heart. Like many New York City residents, starting in the 1950s, Alex and his wife Ada began escaping the crowds, heat, and humidity each summer to a calmer and cooler location. The black brook of this print is located across the street from the Katz’s long-time summer home/studio in Lincolnville, Maine. Alex and Ada acquired the plot of land with this natural feature in about the same year as Alex made this print. “We went up to Maine one winter—and when I was up there, I saw a tree and piece of snow, and I said, they are very interesting to make a big painting of—real big. That was the germ of it: A little thing that makes something big. I’ve painted almost ten to fifteen paintings of the black brook. The early one was with the leaves. That opened up this area of interest. I kept painting it for about ten years; every summer I was doing one.” About this print, in particular, Katz has said, “The distinctions between illustration and painting are muddy. And the edges between decoration and beauty are not clear either, because all beautiful things are a little decorative. It’s actually sunlight hitting the leaves and the brook: it’s a black brook, where the water is dark.”

Alex Katz’s works have been shown both nationally and internationally in more than 200 solo exhibitions as well as at least 500 group exhibitions. Over 100 public institutions worldwide own examples of his works. Moreover, impressions of Katz’s entire print oeuvre can be found in the permanent collections of The Albertina, Vienna, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.