Alex Katz Silkscreened

His quin­tessentially American evocations of people at cocktail parties or the beach and his landscapes of Maine took off in Europe, especially after the collector Charles Saatchi showed off his Katzes in his private museum in London a decade ago. The painter has also found a substantial new audience at home in the United States. As figurative painting made a comeback in the late '80s and '90s, a younger generation of artists began to see Katz with new appreciation. "Artists were looking at their predecessors, but there were not a lot of them who'd continued in that figurative zone consistently, with his level of detachment," says Weinberg. "Coolness is something that artists of all generations admire—cool in the sense of detachment, but [also] cool in the sense of hip."

Like Warhol before him, Katz has no problem bridging the worlds of art and fashion, whether creating artwork for W magazine or getting supermodels such as Christy Turlington and Kate Moss to sit for him.

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