Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) paints from life at a scale and speed that look casual but are the product of extensive preparation, full-size charcoal studies, color tests, and cartoons precede each canvas, so that the apparently effortless, flattened final image is the last step of a deliberate process rather than a spontaneous one.

The son of Russian immigrants, Katz studied at Cooper Union and then spent a formative summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where working outdoors, directly from life, became central to his practice. Coming of age as Abstract Expressionism dominated American painting, he spent years developing a figurative language so spare it was dismissed by critics on both sides, too simple for the avant-garde, too strange for traditional realism, destroying roughly a thousand paintings in his first decade while searching for the flattened style, indebted to Matisse and film, that became his signature.

Katz achieves that flatness through close cropping that pushes a face or figure to the edge of the canvas, large scale that turns an intimate subject into something closer to a billboard, and a deliberate suppression of visible brushwork and shadow, qualities that read as speed but depend on the careful preparatory drawing underneath. His wife, the painter Ada Del Moro, whom he met in 1957 and married the following year, has appeared in more than 250 portraits since, a serial record of the same face across six decades that registers time and fashion more than any single likeness could.

In later work Katz applied the same perceptual logic beyond portraiture: large "environmental" landscapes that surround the viewer the way his cropped portraits confront them, and painted aluminum cutouts, begun in 1959, that carry his flattened figures physically off the canvas and into real space. In 2022, the Guggenheim gave him a nine-decade retrospective filling its entire rotunda, and in 2024 he received the National Medal of Arts. Since 1996, the Colby College Museum of Art has housed a wing devoted entirely to his work, one of the few in the country dedicated to a living artist; his paintings are also held by the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.