Artist: Alex Katz
Title: Blue Umbrella
Medium: Lithograph in Colors on Arches Paper
Year: 1978
Sheet size: 20" x 30"
Frame size: 25.5" x 35.25"
Edition: 68/120
Publisher: GHJ Graphics
Printer: Styria Studios
Inscription: Signed and numbered on front lower corner
Documentation: Gallery Certificate of Authenticity
Alex Katz's Blue Umbrella exemplifies the artist's distinctive approach to portraiture, characterized by reductive forms, crisp contours, and an economy of detail that emphasizes surface and immediacy. Created in 1978, this lithograph demonstrates Katz's longstanding interest in translating his painted aesthetic into printmaking, a medium through which he broadened the accessibility and reach of his work.
The composition presents a close-cropped female figure partially shielded by a large umbrella- notably not blue. The colors of this lithograph diverge from the expected with a subdued palette, the blue and red color pops of the woman's scarf are the only departure from the grey scale. Katz isolates the subject against a simplified background, a strategy that focuses attention on color contrasts and compositional balance rather than narrative context. The umbrella, rendered in a saturated hue, operates as both a visual anchor and an emblem of Katz's interest in distilling imagery to its most essential forms.
Like much of Katz's oeuvre, Blue Umbrella resists psychological interpretation in favor of visual clarity and immediacy, qualities that have come to define his contribution to postwar American art.
Produced in collaboration with GHJ Graphics and printed at Styria Studios, Blue Umbrella was issued in a limited edition of 120 impressions. This example is hand-signed and numbered by the artist in the lower front margin, and is accompanied by a gallery Certificate of Authenticity.
About Alex Katz
Alex Katz is an American painter known for his distinctive contributions to postwar art, bridging the gap between abstraction and figuration. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1927 to Russian immigrant parents, Katz grew up in Queens and later attended the Cooper Union in Manhattan from 1946 to 1949. His studies coincided with the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, yet Katz developed a markedly different approach, one rooted in figuration, clarity, and directness. He further refined his practice at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where plein air painting encouraged his lifelong engagement with landscape.
Katz's early works in the 1950s explored intimate portraiture and domestic subjects, gradually moving toward a flatter, more reductive style. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, he had established his signature aesthetic: crisp, simplified forms, bold color fields, and an economy of detail that evoked both billboard advertising and the immediacy of snapshots. His portraits, often of friends, family, and his wife Ada, became central to his oeuvre, capturing likeness with striking directness while eschewing psychological depth in favor of surface and presence.
Although associated with the emergence of Pop Art, Katz's practice remains distinct. His engagement with contemporary culture overlaps with Pop's embrace of the everyday, but his roots in modernist abstraction and his attention to the formal qualities of painting set him apart. Large-scale canvases of the 1960s and 1970s further underscored his ambition to merge portraiture with the scale of Abstract Expressionism, while his later landscapes translated fleeting light and atmosphere into broad, flattened compositions.
Throughout his career, Katz has also worked in printmaking, cutout sculptures, and public commissions, expanding the reach of his distinctive visual language. His work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Katz's legacy lies in his ability to craft an immediately recognizable style that balances cool detachment with visual elegance. His paintings, both portraits and landscapes, continue to resonate for their formal clarity and enduring dialogue with the history of modern art.
Please wait...
