雜訊

ALEX KATZ, FOLDING CHAIR, 1959, GIFT OF THE ALEX KATZ FOUNDATION Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1927 and educated at Cooper Union. Although he fraternized in the 1950s with the abstract expressionists at the Cedar Bar, their hangout in Greenwich Village, Katz never embraced the gestural style popular in New York, clinging instead to some degree of observation. (In high school he had received traditional training that included drawing from antique casts.) And yet if Katz's work has always celebrated the realism of quotidian life and landscape, it also cunningly incorporates the scale and structure of the ambitious abstract painting of his time. Folding Chair, 1959, with its restrained elegance, is a stately example of this abstracted realism. Katz simplifies the image to its essentials. A pale folding chair meets the olive plane of the floor and gridded windows of the city in a tilted space that opens wide to the viewer and defies perspective. The mode was not well rec