In the summer of 1949 while still an art student at Cooper Union, Alex Katz was invited to choose between summer school at Yale or the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. He chose Skowhegan and discovered an affinity for painting in Maine that has lasted to this day. "At Skowhegan I tried plein air painting and found my subject matter and a reason to devote my life to painting," he has written. "The sensation of painting from the back of my head was a high that I followed until the present....

Alex Katz is one of the most influential painters of our era. Having come of age in the 1950s alongside the New York School of painters and poets, he has impacted generations of artists with his iconic images. Best known for his emotionally ambiguous and psychologically com-plex portraits of cosmopolitan friends and colleagues from the New York art world, he is also admired for his bold, transcendent landscape paintings and his coolly intimate portraits of friends and family-often painted in Maine, where Katz has summered since 1954. Many of Katz's most poetic, melancholy and slyly humorous works have their settings in or near Lincolnville, Maine, and are reproduced here in conjunction with the Farnsworth Art Museum's summer 2005 exhibition. The topic of Maine in Katz's work is examined in depth for the first time, in an essay by art critic Sanford Schwartz. Also included are texts by Suzette McAvoy, the exhibition's curator, and Vincent Katz, the artist's son.

Foreword

Suzette Lane McAvoy

Maine Memories

Vincent Katz

An Unflashy Idyll

Sanford Schwartz

Paintings

Studies

Drawings

Appendix