Renowned for his vivid, larger‐than‐life portraits, Alex Katz is a towering figure in contemporary painting. His work can be found in institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA, LACMA, and the National Portrait Gallery. The revised and expanded edition of Phaidon’s landmark survey is the most up‐to‐date overview of Katz’s prolific 50‐year career. Featuring more than 300 gorgeous reproductions of key works, Alex Katz devotes ample space to the artist’s lush portraits while also including his landscapes, sculptures, and painted books. Rounding out the book’s content are writings from the artist himself; contributions from Robert Storr, Iwona Blazwick, Carter Ratcliff; and a new essay by Barry Schwabsky.
Carter Ratcliff is a poet and an art critic. His books include Give Me Tomorrow (1983), a collection of poems with illustrations by Alex Katz; John Singer Sargent (1983); The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art (1998); and Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art 1965‐1975 (2000). He was awarded the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, College Art Association, in 1987, and is a leading world expert on Alex Katz.
Iwona Blazwick is Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London. As Head of Exhibitions and Display at Tate Modern, London (1997‐2001), as Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1986‐92), and as an independent curator, she has realized many international exhibitions of modern and contemporary art and has published texts on numerous living artists. From 1993‐97 she was Commissioning Editor for Contemporary Art at Phaidon Press.
Barry Schwabsky is a London‐based writer. Currently International Reviews Editor at Artforum and Art Critic at The Nation, he has contributed to numerous art publications, including Phaidon's Jessica Stockholder (1995) and Vitamin P (2002), and is the author of The Widening Circle: The Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (1997), as well as several volumes of poetry. He has taught at Yale, New York University and Goldsmiths, among other institutions.
Robert Storr is Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, formerly curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Alex Katz has single‐handedly invented a new, essential form of painting for our times. He demonstrates the same kind of clarity and directness in his writings as in his art. Ranging from his 1961 essay "Brand New & Terrific" to interviews with artist colleagues Francesco Clemente and Richard Prince, this is an essential collection of Katz texts.
