If you’d walked down New York’s Park Avenue during the summer of 2019 you would have seen, positioned roadside on the grassy landscaped parkways, seven identical cut-outs of a stylish woman. In each of the eight-foot-high flat sculptures, made from smooth porcelain enamel and steel, the female figure wore a yellow sun hat, cropped tan-coloured trousers and a sleeveless black blouse.
The duplicate cut-out sculptures, which were collectively called Park Avenue Departure, depicted the woman from behind with one hand placed casually in her pocket and grey-streaked black hair falling onto her shoulders. She looked, in many ways, like any other pedestrian crossing the city’s street. But she also presented passers-by with a puzzle: who was she and why was her face hidden?
Let’s start by meeting the ninety-two-year-old man behind these public sculptures: Alex Katz. Today, the American artist is renowned for painting pristine portraits using flat surfaces, heightened colours and minimal details. His works have been shown at hundreds of galleries around the world, from the Whitney Museum of American Art to Tate St Ives, but his iconic imagery and stripped-down style took some time to develop.
Born the son of Russian immigrants to New York City in 1927, Katz grew up in the diverse suburb of Queens, where he remembers spending his early days drawing. After returning from a period in the navy in 1946, he enrolled at the city’s Cooper Union School of Art before receiving a scholarship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. It was here that Katz remembers getting ‘really involved in painting, and in particular painting from life’.
Emerging from art school in the early 1950s, Katz moved to Manhattan, where he found a radical new type of painting reigning supreme: abstract expressionism. The likes of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and Willem de Kooning were making colossal, mural-sized works characterised by layers of paint, which they dripped, swept and splattered across the surface of the canvas to give an impression of spontaneity.
In response to this new energetic abstraction, Katz started to work in a more painterly manner. At the same time, he refused to embrace abstract art entirely; still interested in representing the human figure, he turned to modern masters like Matisse for inspiration. However, existing in a space between past and present, Katz didn’t quite fit in: ‘I completely alienated myself from traditional modern art and from traditional realistic painting, and also from the avant-garde.’
During this period, the artist’s confidence was at an all-time low as he fought to find a unique approach to portraiture: ‘I kept making paintings, and they were good, but they were boring.’ Experimenting endlessly, Katz binned ‘maybe a thousand paintings’ in the process. Despite this, the testing paid off; by the mid-1950s he had evolved a crisp and skilfully cool style, which both drew on but also countered the work of his contemporaries. As he has remembered: ‘There were no large figurative paintings that were interesting, as far as I could see, so it was an open area. Those Klines and de Koonings had so much big energy; I wanted to make something that knocked them off the wall. Just like that – more muscle, more energy. They set the standard. It wasn’t the style I wanted to follow, but I wanted to paint up to their standards. So I took a figurative work and I said, “Well, I want a figurative painting on the scale of the Abstract Expressionists,” you know, on a big scale.’
Katz set about making enormous paintings of figures against flat fields of unmodulated colour. Like the abstract expressionists, he was interested in exploring the act of painting itself, with a focus on pure medium, shape and brushstroke. At the same time, Katz took inspiration from visual imagery in the city – packaging, posters and advertising billboards – wanting to capture ‘quick things passing’. Without realising it, he was paving the way for pop art.
By 1957 Katz decided to take real and recognisable people as his subject matter, working from them in live sittings, as he had been taught at art school in Maine. Uninterested in creating narratives, he preferred instead to hold up individuals as icons of the everyday, cropping them in close-up compositions. That very same and pivotal year, the painter’s primary subject, model and muse walked into his life – the woman from the Park Avenue cut-out sculptures, Ada Del Moro.
It was at the opening of his two-artist show at the small, artist-run Tanager gallery that Katz first met Ada. As the evening drew to a close, Ada joined the artist and a group of friends for coffee. Katz remembers, ‘A whole bunch of us went out to have coffee afterward. Ada had a tan, and a great smile, and she was with this guy who looked like Robert Taylor – fantastic-looking guy. But he didn’t put her coat on – I did.’
Recalling this first encounter, Ada remembered how she suddenly found herself the subject of the artist’s gaze: ‘I was sitting with my hands in my lap,’ she said, ‘and this guy that I was interested in was looking at my eyes, my ears, my shoulders. The whole thing was just very sensual. And I didn’t think I could handle it. But then it became just this thing that he did. I was sitting and he was painting, and that was it.’
Straight away, Katz began to paint portraits of Ada; the artist had found his muse and subject. ‘My wife, Ada, is my muse. It just sort of turned out that way. She’s like Dora Maar [Picasso’s muse and lover]. She’s a perfect model – a European–American beauty. If she was two inches taller she could nail Miss America!’
With these words, Katz shows us the potent influence of Picasso, who proudly held up the female muse as an essential instrument in the great male artist’s toolbox. Of course, Picasso’s misogynistic conduct, with Maar and other women in his life, set a bad example, encouraging the exploitation of female partners. However, through his considerate relationship with Ada, Katz demonstrates the way in which the muse deserves to be treated, and it’s reflected in his portraits of her.
Hanging in the Met in New York, you can find one of Katz’s earliest paintings of his muse, titled simply Ada (1957). Dressed in a smart-casual black jumper and a cerulean coloured skirt, Ada is seated on a chair. Positioned against a simple beige background, the focus is on Ada’s distinctive mid-length dark hair and eyes, contrasting with her red lips which are kept closed in an indeterminate expression. As she stares directly out of the canvas, hands folded in her lap, Ada appears thoughtful, assured and relaxed in the artist’s presence.
Katz was captivated by both the beauty and intelligence of this smart, educated woman. At a time when few women followed a career in science, Ada had trained at Brooklyn College and New York University as a research biologist. She then went to Milan on a Fulbright scholarship to specialise in tumour genetics and, by the time she met Katz, was working at the Sloan Kettering Institute as one of the only women employed in the laboratory.
Ada and Katz shared the same ambition, explained in part by their similar backgrounds. Both had been born in New York to immigrant parents, as Katz has openly discussed: ‘We’re Jewish off the boat, and they’re Italian off the boat. On Sunday afternoons, both families listened to opera on the radio. No one ever voted for a Republican.’ Supported by their parents, both Ada and Katz turned to education as a track for upward mobility in American society.
Within a year of meeting, the well-matched couple got married, and in 1960, they welcomed their son Vincent to the world. This was a pivotal moment for Ada, who decided to leave her job at Sloan Kettering to focus on motherhood. This choice also allowed her to become a full-time muse for her artist husband. From the moment that they had met, Ada became Katz’s favourite subject. Now, with more time to give, she also became his main model.
While most couples create family photo albums, Ada and Katz filled the rooms of their home with paintings – mostly of Ada on her own, although some feature the couple together. In Ada’s words: ‘We didn’t take pictures of each other… he painted.’
In The Black Dress (1960) Ada appears repeatedly, six times across the canvas – once again foreshadowing the identical Park Avenue cut-outs. She wears a simple, chic black cocktail dress, and is seen standing, seated and positioned beside Katz’s portrait of their friend, the poet James Schuyler. The scene evokes New York’s gallery openings which, having brought Ada and Katz together, they continued to attend as a couple. Painting her as the only attendee at this imagined opening Katz signals that, for him, she is the only woman in the room; he can’t keep his eyes off her.
Even before she met Katz, Ada had developed a deep interest in contemporary art and literature, alongside her professional career as a scientist. ‘Ada is smart and inquisitive about radical art. She got to Samuel Beckett before the poets I knew did,’ Katz once remarked. Through her marriage to an artist, Ada has moved in artistic circles, and in 1979 she co-founded the Eye and Ear Theater Company, where she invited collaboration between writers and contemporary artists, producing plays in which painters designed sets and costumes.
The Black Dress also highlights Katz’s defining focus on fashion – in portraits of all his models, but particularly those of Ada. We often think of the muse stripped down, laid bare and painted as a site of erotic desire shown off by the artist to admiring onlookers. However, Katz belongs to a significant selection of artists who have refused to portray their romantic partners nude, deliberately, and respectfully, distancing the viewer from the muse’s most intimate self.
Most notably, over the last three years of his life, Amedeo Modigliani – known for his portraits of elongated figures with oval faces – painted his muse and fellow artist Jeanne Hébuterne more than twenty times, but not once does she appear naked. He refused to share his muse completely with the artworks’ audience. ‘Some things are private,’ he seems to say. Similarly, Ada is always clothed, and what she wears, including the black cocktail dress in this painting, is noteworthy.
Katz used fashion in his portraits as a symbolic signifier: ‘I’m painting the society in which I live. So it has that social identification, but it’s also pretty optical. I’m just trying to paint what I’m looking at. Fashion is a part of that.’ As such, his paintings can be read as a visual diary of the context and American society in which he and Ada were living.
Throughout the 1960s, Ada appears in sleek black sunglasses, pillbox hats and stylish sweaters with her Jacqueline Kennedy-cut black helmet hair. A perfect picture of elegance and poise, she is the sophisticated first lady of Katz’s paintings. These portraits celebrate Ada, who like Katz was born to an immigrant family, as having been accepted into American high society. In paintings like The Black Dress she owns her iconic outfit; she is a symbol of success, epitomising the American Dream.
And it’s not just through era-specific fashion that Katz captures Ada’s American beauty over time; he also presents her as an ageing woman. By the Park Avenue Departure cut-outs, grey streaks are visible in the muse’s shoulder-length hair. Similarly, in later painted portraits, fine lines and creases appear on her face. Despite his simplified style, Katz doesn’t shy away from reflecting Ada’s age, refusing to airbrush out the realities of her growing old, gracefully.
In many ways, Katz’s portraits oppose the stereotype of the older woman – often imagined as a sweet, rosy-cheeked old lady, or witch – which we find in both art and the media. Instead, even when she is well into her eighties Ada still appears stylishly well-dressed in contemporary fashions. As he said, ‘I could use her in many different ways and now as an older glamorous woman. She’s perfect. She’ll still stop traffic. It’s perfect casting.’
Stopping traffic is exactly what Ada did through the Park Avenue Departure larger-than-life public sculptures, leaving people to wonder who this sophisticated woman was. But why, if Katz was continuing to celebrate his wife, had the artist turned his muse away from onlookers, hiding her face?
Despite being the subject of over a thousand paintings, Ada has remained an intensely private person, giving very few interviews. At the same time, and since identifying his stylised approach, Katz has treated his sitters, including Ada, with a blend of realism and abstraction, simplifying their features through planes of flat colour and clean, easy outlines. This suited Ada, who is consistently kept at a slight distance from viewers through the artist’s approach. In addition, she is always dressed up, covered, and inscrutable in her expressions.
With the cut-outs, placed so prominently in Park Avenue, Katz also chose to add another device, and one which had been used before by artists including Salvador Dalí in his paintings of Gala. Depicting Ada with her back to the viewer in these public cut-outs, Katz was creating a boundary between artwork and public, separating the muse from the masses. Moreover, by being turned away, as if she could walk off at any moment, she appears to be calling the shots.
We often think of the muse as a younger woman, entering into a short-lived, temporary role. But Ada, who consciously gave up a successful career as a scientist and then committed to the position for over forty-eight years, defies these expectations. Starring in pared-down portraits, scaled up to billboard size, or traffic-stopping cut-out sculptures, she has been held up as a serene, stylish and contemporary icon. Commanding each portrait through the decades, she has required the lifelong attention and devotion of her artist partner. Today Katz’s paintings of Ada are his most coveted.