Alex Katz

(American, born 1927) Alex Katz studied art in both New York and Skowhegan, Maine. Like many American artists of his generation, he was inspired by the American Expressionists and also in the 1950s, Jackson Pollock. Katz created paintings based on photographs,and he painted landscapes and figures from life. Later Katz distinguished himself from his avant-garde contemporaries by focusing on purely representational art, painting figures in vibrant planes of flat, saturated color. He was adept at printmaking, and his work of the 1980s reflects the crisp nature of graphics.