Exceptional Works: Alex Katz

Ada and Flowers, 1980

“I think the big change came in 1957 when I started to paint Ada over and over again.”

—Alex Katz

Alex Katz

Ada and Flowers, 1980

Oil on canvas

95 7/8 x 71 7/8 inches (243.5 x 182.6 cm)

Framed: 97 1/4 x 73 1/8 inches (247 x 185.7 cm)

Ada and Flowers (1980) is an iconic work by the celebrated American artist Alex Katz. Featuring two of the artist’s most enduring motifs, this large-scale painting depicts his wife and “constant muse,” Ada, against a vibrant floral foreground.

Katz is known for his pop-inflected depictions of fellow artists, family, and friends, often closely cropped and portrayed against flat, colorful backgrounds. Committed to subjects drawn from everyday life, Katz employs a distinct take on modernity resulting in instantly recognizable works that have been presented in numerous museum exhibitions; in 2022 and 2023, Alex Katz: Gathering at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York surveyed eight decades of the artist’s work.

Alex and Ada Katz in New York, November 1985. Photo by Allen Ginsberg. © Allen Ginsberg Estate

“I think of myself as a modern person and I want my paintings to look that way,” Katz has explained. “They’re responsive to the immediate.”

Educated at Cooper Union, Katz garnered acclaim as part of the New York School in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Rather than aligning himself with the gestural abstraction being pursued by contemporaries including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, however, Katz sought to pair his admiration for Cézanne, Bonnard, and Matisse—whose cut out collages particularly influenced him—with a distinctly modern sensibility.

In the late 1950s, even as American art turned decisively away from representation, Katz became increasingly interested in portraiture. His monumental, stylized images are instantly recognizable. “I’m not interested in narrative,” the artist has said. “I’m interested in presence.”

The artist met his future wife, née Ada Del Moro, in October 1957 at an opening for his two-person show at the Tanager Gallery in New York; he painted his first portrait of her the same year, and the couple were married in 1958. Ada has been a constant subject, appearing in more than two hundred and fifty portraits over the course of six decades. As Katz’s friend, the critic Stanford Schwartz, observed, “Ada gave him a complex human presence that I don’t think I had seen before in his work.”

“The multiple faces of Ada, whether pooled in one image or seen in successive works, are without parallel in the history of portraiture. Ada’s phases are an index to the active life as an ongoing process.”

—Lawrence Alloway, art critic and curator, 1981

Alex Katz, Ada and Flowers, 1980 (detail)

Pressed to the foreground, an unruly bouquet of wildflowers nearly covers Ada’s face, their disorder a stark contrast to Ada’s restrained visage. The painting negotiates intimacy and detachment through scale and composition; the vibrant greens and yellows beckon the viewer closer, even as their density and looming proximity create a barrier to Katz’s inscrutable subject, establishing an unusual sense of depth.

An errant blue lupine that protrudes from the arrangement and crosses in front of Ada’s face connotes a personal symbolism. Katz’s unusual use of a two‑tone background also emphasizes shadow and depth, a notable departure from the uniformly lit surfaces and monochromatic backdrops that are typical in his portraits.

The floral arrangement harkens to Katz’s earliest depictions of singular blooms in the late 1960s. These extreme close-ups on small canvases were often sketched en plein air and painted during the artist’s summer residencies in Maine. The cluster in Ada and Flowers additionally prefigures a shift in Katz’s subject matter toward landscapes by the end of the 1980s. Katz returned to the subject of flowers in the early 2000s, producing paintings at larger scale that showcase numerous blooms isolated against monochromatic backdrops in his signature flat, vividly colored style.

In his dozens of portraits of Ada, Katz rarely couples her with flowers, with the exception of the earlier Ada with Superb Lily (1967; Rose Art Museum, Massachusetts). A related, smaller painting on Masonite titled Ada with Wild Flowers (1980) is in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

Cover and spread from Alex Katz Paints Ada, 2006

“The paintings look easy, the way Fred Astaire made dancing look easy and Cole Porter made words and music sound easy, but don’t let’s be fooled.”

—John Russell, art critic, 1986

Installation view, The Great Unseen Collection: A Selection of Works from Joel and Carole Bernstein, David Zwirner, New York, 2026

“Ada for me is like Dora Maar to Picasso. But Ada has better shoulders, and could easily be Miss America.”

—Alex Katz

Cover image: Ada and Alex Katz in Maine, 1990

The Great Unseen Collection: A Selection of Works from Joel and Carole Bernstein