THE NEUBERGER MUSEUM OF ART PRESENTS BRAND-NEW & TERRIFIC: ALEX KATZ IN THE 1950S

Opening July 1st, Brand-New & Terrific brings into focus the artist’s little-known, formative work from which his signature style emerged.

Neuberger Museum of Art

Alex Katz, “Bather” (1959), oil on linen, 48 x 72 inches, 
Colby College Museum of Art, Museum purchase made possible by The Alex Katz Foundation, Peter and Paula Lunder through the Lunder Foundation, Michael Gordon ’66, Barbara and Theodore Alfond through the Acorn Foundation, and the Jere Abbott, Acquisitions Fund, 2016.189 (Art © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY)

Brand-New & Terrific: Alex Katz in the 1950s — the largest museum exhibition to showcase the artist’s work from his pioneering period in the 1950s — will be on view for the first time in the New York metro area at the Neuberger Museum of Art on the campus of Purchase College in Purchase, New York from July 1st through October 14th, 2018. Organized by the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, in close collaboration with the 90-year old artist, this national touring exhibition features more than 60 works from public and private collections as well as many rarely seen works from Katz’s own holdings.

Brand-New & Terrific brings into focus the artist’s little-known, formative work from which his signature style emerged; it was a response to Abstract Expressionism and his contemporary take on traditional painting. By reintroducing and reinterpreting the figure, Katz was, in fact, a game-changer–opening the door for the subsequent Pop Art movement. He pared down and simplified his portraits, landscapes, seascapes, and figure studies to their most fundamental elements, rendering them in blunt, bold, and flat colors with sparse detail, transforming his circle of family and friends, his wife (and muse), seaside bathers, and everyday scenes in middle-class America.

The exhibition is funded in part by grants from the Wyeth Foundation of American Art and the Maine Arts Commission, and at the Neuberger by the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art and the Purchase College Foundation.

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