Description:
Portrait of woman (artist's wife) with black hair, light skin, and pale blue eyes. She wears a brown jacket, lace blouse and a brown hat with an orange band.
Label Text:
Excerpt from wall label “What Is Love: Selections from the Permanent Collection,” April 19 – June 3, 2007:
Alex Katz’s partner Ada has been the focus of many of his paintings and prints including this one. Katz met Ada in 1957 and has been creating images of her ever since. While his compositions vary from close-ups of Ada’s face to her entire body, he often chooses to place her in a vague setting, offering the viewer little sense of where she stands. This practice leads to a sense of timelessness and perhaps the eternal. While in this work the hat might date Ada more closely to the 1970s, Katz has simplified the details of his partner’s features to the point of abstraction. In his prints, Katz often repeats subjects from his paintings, an approach that allows him to further crop, flatten, reduce the number of tones, and refine the image. The title further directs attention away from Ada, emphasizing his interest in formal issues. - Julie Thomson, (M.A. '07)
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=UM+2001.3 |
