Gavel & Grace: The Estate of the Honorable Sandra Schultz Newman

Provenance:

The Artist

Marlborough Gallery, New York

Acquired directly from the above in 1978

Note: 

Archival records from the gallery include a handwritten notation indicating that the title was altered from “Lady” to “Laddy,” with the former crossed out and replaced. While the correct spelling remains unconfirmed, this revision offers a compelling glimpse into the work’s early history.

Lot Note:

This 1975 painting, Trishie and Laddy (Lady), of a close-cropped view of a woman and her dog amid a sunlit park, highlights Katz’s ability to distill personality and explore larger thematic types through portraiture.

The subject of international acclaim, including more than 200 solo exhibitions, Alex Katz (American, b. 1927) came of age in New York during the 1950s alongside the rise of Abstract Expressionism, which he deliberately eschewed, preferring instead to champion representational painting. To this end he applied a now characteristic and vibrant visual language balancing realism and abstraction, ambivalence and intimacy. Katz has sought to share his world through his painting, whether through hundreds of portraits of his wife of almost 65 years, Ada, his home in coastal Maine, or, as in Trishie and Laddy (Lady), scenes and characters from downtown New York City among the cultural avantgarde and his love of dogs.

Katz has created a number of paintings and prints featuring dogs throughout his career, with his dog Sunny as a frequent model. A double portrait, Vincent and Sunny (1967), of Katz’s son and the Skye Terrier even hangs in the foyer of the Katz apartment.[i] With his typical flat handling of color and form bordering on the edge of abstraction, Katz strips away extraneous detail in order to center the personality and spirt of these animals, lavishing the same care as for any other portrait. This is especially apparent in these double portraits of dogs and people such as Trishie and Laddy (Lady), where Katz relies on a shared visual language between Trishie and Laddy to contrast their personalities and emotional states within the snapshot moment of his encounter with them.

Within the painting, elements of Trishie and Laddy mirror each other. The V-neck of the woman’s shirt echoes the triangular open mouth of the pup, possibly a Borzoi or other aristocratic hound. The soft fringes of Trishie’s bangs are reminiscent of the waves of Laddy’s ears while the short dark strokes of the dog’s whiskers are seen again in the lashes covering the woman’s downcast eyes. Balanced by the complementary greens in the surrounding park, each is defined by a shared palette of pinks, warm oranges, and browns, with some white highlights and only a hint of cooler grays in the dog’s nose and woman’s irises.

In highlighting the connection between Laddy and Trishie, their different personalities are laid bare: Trishie’s shadowed eyes, bleary from sleep or otherwise unfocused in comparison to Laddy’s exuberance, and Laddy’s panting in excitement in opposition to Trishie’s closed mouth and narrowed eyes. The woman’s careful grooming, set off by her vertical beehive hairstyle, reiterates stillness and a sense of buttoned-up composure offset by the horizontal darting into the frame by Laddy’s long snout.

Katz, when describing how he chooses his subjects, explained his goals of illustrating real people while also examining social types and themes through carefully presented pictorial information. He shares:

When you made it figure and environment in a real clear way, it had a way of abstracting into a more generalized statement. The particular person became A Woman.... I figured if I could paint a particular subject, it could be both specific and universal. It could be a certain person and a generalized woman.[ii]

This dual appeal of balancing the familiar with the universal is captured in Trishie and Laddy (Lady). Apparently awoken and thus faced with quotidian task of taking her ecstatic dog for a walk, the woman pauses, arranging and shellacking a complicated hairstyle into place before heading to a New York park with her well-heeled dog. Trishie and Laddy reflect a generalize pair contrasting energy and composure, coolness and fervor, that might be encountered on New York City streets as well as a very specific woman and dog the viewer would like to know more.

Bibliography:

Fortini, Amanda. “Alex Katz Is Still Perfecting His Craft.” T Magazine, The New York Times, August 18, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/t-magazine/alex-katz.html.

Katz, Vincent. “The Look of a Certain Person.” In Alex Katz Portraits. Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2003.http://vincentkatz.net/abc2/books_abc2_AK2.htm

[i] As of 2022. Amanda Fortini, “Alex Katz Is Still Perfecting His Craft,” T Magazine, The New York Times, August 18, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/t-magazine/alex-katz.html.

[ii] Vincent Katz, “The Look of a Certain Person,” In Alex Katz Portraits. Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2003.http://vincentkatz.net/abc2/books_abc2_AK2.htm.