Katz, Alex - Anna (Anna Wintour) 2009 - postcard

Art Postcard
• Work of art title: 'Anna' [Anna Wintour b. 1949]
• Artist (if known): Alex Katz
• Media or other details:  oil on linen
• Publisher / Gallery: National Portrait Gallery
• Postally used:  no
• Stamp & postmark details (if relevant):
• Size: slightly larger than modern
• Notes & condition details:

NOTES:

Size: 'Modern' is usually around 6in x 4in / 'Old Standard' is usually around 5 1/2in x 3 1/2in. Larger sizes mentioned, but if you need to know the exact size please ask.

All postcards are not totally new and are pre-owned. It's inevitable that older cards may show signs of ageing and use, particularly sent through the post. Any faults other than normal ageing are noted.

Stock No.: A831

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NOTE: All postcards are sent in brand new stiffened envelopes which I have bought for the task. These are specially made to protect postcards and you may be able to re-use them. In addition there are other costs to sending so the above charge is not just for the stamp!

I will give a full refund if you are not fully satisfied with the postcard.

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Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information:

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Alex Katz (born July 24, 1927) is an American figurative artist. In particular, he is known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.

Alex Katz was born to a Jewish family^[1] in Brooklyn, New York, as the son of an émigré who had lost a factory he owned in Russia to the Soviet revolution.^[2] In 1928 the family moved to St. Albans, Queens, where Katz grew up.^[3]

From 1946 to 1949 Katz studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Skowhegan exposed him to painting from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today. Katz explains that Skowhegan’s plein air painting gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting.”^[4] Every year from early June to mid-September, Katz moves from his SoHo loft to a 19th-century clapboard farmhouse in Lincolnville, Maine.^[5] A summer resident of Lincolnville since 1954, he has developed a close relationship with local Colby College.^{[citation needed]} From 1954 to 1960, he made a number of small collages of still lifes, Maine landscapes, and small figures.^[6] He met Ada Del Moro, who had studied biology at New York University, at a gallery opening in 1957.^[2] In 1960, Katz had his first (and only) son, Vincent Katz.

Katz has admitted to destroying a thousand paintings during his first ten years as a painter in order to find his style. Since the 1950s, he worked to create art more freely in the sense that he tried to paint “faster than [he] can think.”^[7] His works seem simple, but according to Katz they are more reductive, which is fitting to his personality.^[8] ""(The) one thing I don’t want to do is things already done. As for particular subject matter, I don’t like narratives, basically.""^[9]

Katz's paintings are divided almost equally into the genres of portraiture and landscape. Since the 1960s he has painted views of New York (especially his immediate surroundings in Soho), the landscapes of Maine, where he spends several months every year, as well as portraits of family members, artists, writers and New York society protagonists.^[12] His paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form, their economy of line, and their cool but seductive emotional detachment.^[13] A key source of inspiration is the woodcuts produced by Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro.^[14]

In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. Ada Katz, whom he married in 1958, has been the subject of over 250^[15] portraits throughout his career.^[16] To make one of his large works, Katz paints a small oil sketch of a subject on a masonite board; the sitting might take an hour and a half. He then makes a small, detailed drawing in pencil or charcoal, with the subject returning, perhaps, for the artist to make corrections. Katz next blows up the drawing into a ""cartoon,"" sometimes using an overhead projector, and transfers it to an enormous canvas via ""pouncing""—a technique used by Renaissance artists, involving powdered pigment pushed through tiny perforations pricked into the cartoon to recreate the composition on the surface to be painted. Katz pre-mixes all his colors and gets his brushes ready. Then he dives in and paints the canvas—12 feet wide by 7 feet high or even larger—in a session of six or seven hours.

Beginning in the late 1950s, Katz developed a technique of painting on cut panels, first of wood, then aluminum, calling them ""cutouts"". These works would occupy space like sculptures, but their physicality is compressed into planes, as with paintings.^[17] In later works, the cutouts are attached to wide, U-shaped aluminum stands, with a flickering, cinematic presence enhanced by warm spotlights. Most are close-ups, showing either front-and-back views of the same figure’s head or figures who regard each other from opposite edges of the stand.^[18]

After 1964, Katz increasingly portrayed groups of figures. He would continue painting these complex groups into the 1970s, portraying the social world of painters, poets, critics, and other colleagues that surrounded him. He began designing sets and costumes for choreographer Paul Taylor in the early 1960s, and he has painted many images of dancers throughout the years. One Flight Up (1968) consists of more than 30 portraits of some of the leading lights of New York’s intelligentsia during the late 1960s, such as the poet John Ashbery, the art critic Irving Sandler and the curator Henry Geldzahler, who championed Andy Warhol. Each portrait is painted using oils on both sides of a sliver of aluminium that has then been cut into the shape of the subject’s head and shoulders. The silhouettes are arranged predominantly in four long rows on a plain metal table.^[19]

After his Whitney exhibition in 1974, Katz focused on landscapes stating ""I wanted to make an environmental landscape, where you were IN it.""^[20] In the late 1980s, Katz took on a new subject in his work: fashion models in designer clothing, including Kate Moss and Christy Turlington.^[4] ""I've always been interested in fashion because it's ephemeral,"" he said.^[21]

Anna Wintour, OBE (/'w?nt?r/; born 3 November 1949) is the English editor-in-chief of American Vogue, a position she has held since 1988. In 2013, she became artistic director for Condé Nast, Vogue's publisher. With her trademark pageboy bob haircut and dark sunglasses, Wintour has become an important figure in much of the fashion world, widely praised for her eye for fashion trends and her support for younger designers. Her reportedly aloof and demanding personality has earned her the nickname ""Nuclear Wintour"".

She is the eldest daughter of Charles Wintour, editor of the London Evening Standard. Her father consulted her on how to make the newspaper relevant to the youth of the era. Anna became interested in fashion as a teenager. Her career in fashion journalism began at two British magazines. Later, she moved to the United States, with stints at New York and House & Garden. She returned home for a year to turn around British Vogue, and later assumed control of the franchise's magazine in New York, reviving what many saw as a stagnating publication. Her use of the magazine to shape the fashion industry has been the subject of debate within it. Animal rights activists have attacked her for promoting fur, while other critics have charged her with using the magazine to promote elitist views of femininity and beauty.

A former personal assistant, Lauren Weisberger, wrote the 2003 best selling roman à clef The Devil Wears Prada, later made into a successful film starring Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, a fashion editor, believed to be based on Wintour. In 2009, she was the focus of another film, R.J. Cutler's documentary The September Issue.

type=printed postcards

theme=artists signed

sub-theme=art

number of items=single

period=1945 - present

postage condition=unposted