Alex Katz: Cutouts

New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1979. [32] pages, illustrations; 20 cm. Exhibition held February 21 to March 17, 1979. Near fine. Firm binding, clean inside copy. Age toning. A Pop artist? A Realist? Something in-between? Alex Katz has always been hard to define. This exhibition focuses on his monumental "cutouts" of the sixties and seventies, a series he inaugurated in 1959, which synthesize portrait painting and commercial billboards (one is a study for a Times Square Mural). Both paintings and sculptures, they defied art-historical conventions at the time he conceived them, putting Katz in a similar position to Rauschenberg & Johns, with their "combine" paintings and assemblages, and Frank Stella, with his shaped canvases. Ratcliff's essay interprets the cutouts in terms of gestalt theory, which was popular among many formalist art critics in the seventies. Some of the portraits in this exhibition include images of Philip Pearlstein, Edwin Denby, and Sanford Schwartz.. 1st. Paperback. Very Good. 8vo. Collectible.