Alex Katz is a contemporary American artist renowned for his large-format paintings of landscapes, flowers, and portraits of his wife Ada. Katz’s flattened forms and simplification of detail are trademarks of works such as Gray Day (1992). “We compete for audiences, as artists. I'm competing with the Abstract Expressionist guys. I'll knock ‘em off the wall,” he once remarked. “If you put my work next to an aggressive A.E. painting, I'll eat most of ‘em up. And I want to compete with the kids. I'm there with the kids.” Born on July 24, 1927 in Brooklyn, NY, as a young man, he attended the Cooper Union School of Art and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. It was here that the...