ALEX KATZ

(B. 1927)

Yvonne with Flowers
2001

Footnotes

Provenance
Pace Wildenstein, New York (#34446)
Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto (7780)
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2014

Exhibited
Toronto, Mira Godard Gallery, Alex Katz - Paintings & Prints, 2012



Executed in his signature style using pared back, bold lines and heightened, vibrant colours, Yvonne with Flowers from 2001 is a truly exceptional work of portraiture by Alex Katz, one of America's definitive painters of the 20th century. Growing up in the New York art world of the 1940s and 50s, when non-representational abstraction dominated the discourse, Katz resisted the dogma of the period and developed his own form of figuration. His direct visual vocabulary, inspired by artists such as Paul Klee, Édouard Manet and Henri Matisse, captured everyday moments from his own life and is instantly recognizable in it's cinematic and refined style. With a recent, highly acclaimed, major career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and with works included in many of the worlds most prestigious museum collections, Alex Katz's artistic vision has been a defiant voice across centuries and continents. He is one of the great American masters.

Painted in 2001, and coming to auction for the very first time, Yvonne with Flowers is an elegant large-scale portrait. The sitter is Yvonne Force Villareal, Co-Founder of Art Production Fund, a non-profit organization dedicated to commissioning and producing ambitious public art projects, wife of the artist Leo Villareal and a leading figure in the Maine arts community. Close-cropped against a background of larger-than-life yellow pansies, bright pink carnations and a vivid turquoise blue sky, she gazes out at the viewer, her expression conveys a sense of intimacy and confidence whilst remaining cooly detached at the same time. Typical for the artists work, all extraneous details are stripped away, leaving only the most vital. Yvonne's expression is dispassionate, there is no context or psychological engagement leaving the viewer with an impression bordering on abstraction.

In the present work, Katz defines his model's features in his distinctive wet-on-wet brushwork that forces him to finish each work in a single session. Developed from the Renaissance fresco technique of pinning paper to the canvas, and forcing dry pigment through pinholes to create an outline, Katz shapes a vivid human presence with the most minimal of means. The picture is a warm portrayal of Force Villareal, whom Katz has known since the early 1990s and who has since been one of his most painted models after his wife Ada. She features in over 20 paintings, cut-outs and prints of the artist, each depiction revealing a different facet of the sitter. The inclusion of flowers, another one of Katz's career long signature themes, gives the work a fresh springlike quality, similar to Flora in Sandro Botticelli's masterwork Primavera.

Offsetting the daringly close crop of the face and flowers with a large canvas, Yvonne with Flowers is evocative of the billboards and cinema screens that influenced the artist in the 1960s. Like a movie still, projected onto a flat cinema screen, the work embodies a distinct Pop aesthetic despite the fact that Katz never saw himself as a Pop artist; if anything he was a precursor to it. Whilst at first, his works with their bold colours and strong close ups seemed to be related to the emerging Pop movement of the 1960s, Katz and his craft-based approach to painting stood apart from the preeminent artistic movements. "Minimalism was excluding things, but my work was compression," he told Calvin Tomkins, as for conceptual art, it was "mostly philosophical ideas, and it comes from universities. A lot of artists don't master their craft until they're thirty-five, but you can be a first-class conceptual artist when you're eighteen" (the artist in: Calvin Tomkins, 'Alex Katz's Life in Art', newyorker.com, 27 August 2018). As for his connection to Pop Art, Katz always painted scenes from his life, friends and family members, not popular culture.

Having been featured in nearly 500 group shows internationally and in over 200 solo exhibitions since 1951, Alex Katz has been honoured with numerous retrospectives around the globe. His work has been shown in some of the most prestigious museums in the world, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Tate, London, the Albertina Museum in Vienna and The Guggenheim in Bilbao. His recent career-spanning retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has been highly praised by critics and enhanced an already strong demand from collectors and institutions internationally. Yvonne with Flowers offers the opportunity to buy a stellar example of the artist's oeuvre, a wonderful addition to any art collection.