(born in Brooklyn/New York in 1927)
Houston (Vormals Washington Square), 1999,
signed, titled and dated 1999 on the overlap,
oil on canvas, 244.6 x 305 cm

Provenance:
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris
European Private Collection
Sotheby’s London 13 February 2014, lot 346
acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Exhibited:
Salzburg, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Alex Katz: Marines & More,
1999 with ill.
Baden Baden, Museum Frieder Burda, Sammlung Frieder Burda, 2004–5,
p. 77, no. 44 with ill.
Neuss, Langen Foundation; Spanbroek, Sheringa Museum of Realist Art, Alex Katz in Europäischen Sammlungen, 2006–7, pp. 78–79 with ill
Mönchsberg, Museum der Moderne, Alex Katz: New York/Maine, 2013,
p. 130 with ill.

”People think that what they see is real and for ever. But it’s not true. What you see is conditioned by your culture. For example, when I was a kid, Washington Square was like a weak watercolor. Right? And now it’s a TV set. Someone from out of town sees Washington Square, they don’t see a weak watercolor, they see a TV set. They say, ‘Wow, it’s so real!’
From, Alex Katz the smartest people bought
my work by Emma Brockes,
The Guardian 29/10/2018

Katz‘s paintings are divided almost equally into the genres of portraiture and landscape. There is also a division between his landscapes: the ones of Maine where he spends several months every year and the views of New York that he started taking in the 1960s depicting mostly the neighborhood of Soho where he lives and has his studio.
This painting represents Houston Street, the major east-west thoroughfare in downtown Manhattan that crosses the Island from East to West. Houston Street, (named after William Houston a delegate to the Continental Congress in the late 1700), delimits the borders of SoHo, that stands for South of Houston.
Stylistically this work seems to recall the softer edges and the composition of an Impressionist work of art. Katz has often looked at Monet’s art, in a recent interview he affirmed that close to his house in Maine there is a pond with waterlilies, “ I‘ve been looking at them for 5o years but I never touched them because of Monet”
( from Alex Katz on his works, worries and wife. Interview with the artist on the eve of his exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of London, 2010, Phaidon)

In fact it was only in the most recent years that he executed works for a show at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris dedicated to Monet’s waterlilies ( Alex Katz. Waterlilies-Homage to Monet series 2009-2010, Paris 14/5-2/9/2019).

The main difference between his recent waterlilies and this painting stands in the edges, that in these recent works have become harder, in the same interview he said “I feel like I’ve been moving towards hard edges in the last 10 years.  When I started doing some of those big landscapes some of those strokes were very hard edged and it looked ok, and I got thinking about edges and hard edges and I realize how a really good painter can paint a hard edge and it doesn’t become descriptive when it becomes descriptive it has no interior mass or volume”
(from Alex Katz on his works, worries and wife. Interview with the artist on the eve of his exhibition at the National portrait Gallery, Phaidon)

In his work Katz seems to maintain a sense of abstraction regardless of the edges and a fascination with Impressionist Art. Technically most of his paintings are realistic but as he affirms he paints what is in front of him: People think that what they see is real and for ever. But it is not true. What you see is conditioned by your culture. For example, when I was a kid, Washington Square was like a weak watercolour. Right? And now it’s a TV set. Someone from out of town sees Washington Square they don’t see a weak watercolor, they see a TV set. They say, “Wow, it’s so real! “
(From, Alex Katz the smartest people bought my work by Emma Brockes, The Guardian 29/10/2018)