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.