Folding Chair
1959
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 121.3 x 123.8 cm (47 3/4 x 48 3/4 in.) framed: 123.83 × 126.37 × 3.81 cm (48 3/4 × 49 3/4 × 1 1/2 in.)
Classification
Painting
Department
CMC
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of The Alex Katz Foundation
Accession Number
2009.104.1
Art Historical Context
**Folding Chair** by Alex Katz, created in 1959, the artist's emerging signature style in oil on canvas, a medium that allowed Katz to achieve his hallmark flatness and bold color planes. Measuring nearly four feet square (121.3 x 123.8 cm), this painting exemplifies Katz's shift from smaller collages to large-scale works, drawing inspiration from everyday American life during the post-war consumer boom. As a key figure bridging Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Katz simplified forms to evoke the graphic punch of billboards and movie posters, rendering ordinary subjects with striking immedia...
About the Artist
Alex Katz
Alex Katz, born on July 24, 1927, in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian émigré parents, grew up in St. Albans, Queens, in a family immersed in the arts—his mother had been an actress in Yiddish theater. Katz honed his skills at Woodrow Wilson High School's arts program before enrolling at The Cooper Union in 1946, where he studied painting under Morris Kantor, absorbing modern art theories and techniq...