“My contention is that my paintings are as realistic as Rembrandt’s…it was realistic painting in its time. It’s no longer a realistic painting. Realism’s a variable. For an artist, this is the highest thing an artist can do – to make something that’s real for his time, where he lives. But people don’t see it as realistic, they see it as abstract. But for me it’s realistic.”
With its radiant chromatic palette, refined contours, and graphic immediacy, Lavender Shirt epitomises Alex Katz’s singular contribution to the development of contemporary figurative painting. Executed with an arresting clarity of form, the present work depicts a poised young woman, stylish and serene, whose presence is magnified by the composition’s closely cropped framing. At the centre of the canvas, the eponymous lavender blouse blooms outward in soft tonal harmony, anchoring the image in a field of subtly orchestrated colour. Against a characteristically ambient backdrop, Katz eschews superfluous detail in favour of visual economy, distilling the sitter’s form into the most essential and expressive elements of line, light, and hue. The resulting image is as immediate as it is enigmatic, capturing a moment of quiet introspection that hovers delicately between realism and stylised abstraction.
The sitter’s half-turned pose and confident gaze are emblematic of Katz’s portraiture, which often balances emotional resonance with a palpable sense of presence. Her sharply delineated hairline, luminous skin, and softened features evoke a composure that is at once intimate and reserved, aligning her with the artist’s broader exploration of contemporary beauty as a mode of timeless iconography. Unlike traditional portraiture, however, Katz does not concern himself with biography or personal narrative. In Lavender Shirt, Katz does not present an individual, but an image: a self-contained ideal that speaks to the transitory nature of perception itself.
Katz’s engagement with the fashion world, particularly through his 1994 Isaac Mizrahi Series – other examples of which portray his wife Ada wearing garments by the designer – offers a critical lens through which to view Lavender Shirt. Since the 1950s, Katz has been deeply attuned to the visual rhythms of American fashion, drawing inspiration from magazines, models, and designers whose work epitomises the aesthetic codes of contemporary life. His portraits often reflect a fascination with style as a mode of individual expression and cultural performance. In Lavender Shirt, the titular garment becomes more than a formal device; it serves as the chromatic and compositional centre of the painting, amplifying the figure’s presence while echoing Katz’s ongoing interest in the interface between art and design. This alignment of fine art with sartorial elegance exemplifies Katz’s enduring ability to capture the fleeting poise of a moment – simultaneously intimate, public, and iconic.
This distilled aesthetic is the result of Katz’s meticulously honed process, which merges classical methodologies with modern tools. The artist begins with pencil drawings and oil sketches, then enlarges his compositions using the Renaissance cartoon technique, a method in which the image is transferred onto canvas through delicate outlines, allowing for precision without sacrificing immediacy. Katz’s application of paint follows an alla prima or wet-on-wet technique, enabling broad, fluid brushstrokes that capture the freshness of his initial vision while preserving the structural integrity of the final form.
Born in Brooklyn in 1927 to Russian émigré parents, Katz studied at The Cooper Union and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where he began to formulate his commitment to figuration in the face of Abstract Expressionism’s prevailing dominance. Rather than embracing gestural excess, Katz pursued a visual language of distilled form and frontal clarity, rejecting the expressive interiority of his peers in favour of a surface-oriented engagement with appearance, affect and time. Over the decades, this idiosyncratic approach has matured into a distinctive style; one that bridges the gap between high modernist aesthetics and the vernacular immediacy of advertising, cinema, and popular imagery. As Donald Kuspit has noted, Katz’s portraits “eloquently convey the tension between the determinate outer appearance and the indeterminate inner reality of someone known only from the outside... suggesting the mystery of their inner existence, perhaps even to themselves” (Donald Kuspit, Alex Katz: Night Paintings, New York 1991, p. 8).
“The look of Katz’s painting, his famous style, is grounded in his technique, in what he can do with a brush. That brush has had a lot of practice, but its decisive eloquence was there pretty much from the beginning.”
Katz’s work is today represented in major museum collections across the globe, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tate Modern. His most recent retrospective, Alex Katz: Gathering, presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York from 2022–2023, offered a sweeping account of his unparalleled contribution to postwar American painting. Within this retrospective arc, works such as Lavender Shirt stand out as exemplars of Katz’s mature idiom; a visual language defined by restraint, clarity, and a profound attunement to the fleeting textures of modern life. By merging aesthetic refinement with an almost cinematic immediacy, Lavender Shirt reveals Katz not only as a chronicler of the present, but as one of the most enduring and perceptive visual poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.