1963 Alex Katz Painting
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GUEST:
May dad has always been a self-taught mechanic, and he became an automobile dealer, and he thought it would be an interesting idea back in the '60s to try to work out sort of a barter arrangement with artists-- new artists and anybody who had anything of interest, really-- and he put an ad in the Times wanting to trade automotive repairs, parts, cars, actually. It took a long while, but ultimately, the response was just certainly wilder than anything he had expected. CBS News did a radio interview with him, the New York Times picked it up, and he got flooded with written letters wanting to engage in some type of a barter arrangement.
APPRAISER:
This is a work by Alex Katz.
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
It's signed and dated here '63. Is that around the time your father acquired it?
GUEST:
Yes it is, a few years later. The big response was somewhere in the 1967 range.
APPRAISER:
Oh, okay.
GUEST:
I believe that there was an introduction made by another artist and that my father actually met Alex Katz and did whatever type of exchange was done.
APPRAISER:
And who was the other artist?
GUEST:
The other artist was Neil Welliver.
APPRAISER:
Interesting. Alex Katz was born in 1927. He studied both at Cooper Union in New York and Skowhegan in Maine. And he said that he learned how to paint from drawings at Cooper Union, but at Skowhegan, they encouraged him to draw from life, and this was a major factor in his development as an artist. He also later taught at Yale, and he got that teaching position through Neil Welliver.
GUEST:
Oh, that's interesting.
APPRAISER:
Katz lived in Greenwich Village in the '50s, and that's when abstract expressionism was the major dominant school of painting in New York. And he and a few other artists decided to buck this trend and embrace the idea of realistically painting figures and landscapes. Katz actually became known as kind of the leader of the school of new realism in contemporary art. And what he's most known for are these images that are sort of flatly painted. They look almost two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional. Your picture is a bit more sketchy. It does have this wonderful green color that is associated with Katz. You see, he used the green in a lot of his pictures. This is in oil. It's painted on board which may be masonite, but I can't see the back of it. One thing that might affect the value of this work is if it could be determined if it was a study for another work. I think if this were to be offered in a retail gallery, the asking price might be in the $50,000 range.
GUEST:
My goodness. What a wonderful surprise.
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