Yellow House 2

In the mid-1950s Alex Katz began producing large-scale paintings that prefigured Pop Art. His influences include sources as varied as early American painting, Japanese woodblock prints, fashion photography, and Abstract Expressionism. Yellow House 2 depicts a window on Katz’s summer home in Maine, a recurring subject in his paintings. Neither romanticized nor sentimental, the stylized rendering becomes a version of a self-portrait, infused with memory of a place. The subject is cropped and foregrounded, which resembles his approach to portraits of family and friends. Centering the composition on a darkened window, Katz does not reveal the size of the house or its surroundings, offering instead an intimate perspective that is at once harmonious and disquieting.