Alex Katz Montage

A maverick from the beginning, Katz came of age when Abstract Expressionism still reigned, yet he turned to painting landscapes and the human figure. Over time, his paintings got bigger. "Appropriating the monumental scale, stark composition and dramatic light of the Abstract Expressionists, he would beat the heroic generation at their own game," the critic Carter Ratcliff wrote in a 2005 monograph on Katz. "It was an open door," Katz says today. "No one was doing representational painting on a large scale."

Taking cues from Cinemascope movies and billboards, his highly stylized pictures also anticipated Pop Art. His deadpan evocation of flat, bright figures had an everyday quality that linked them to commercial art and popular culture. Early on, his work was often panned. Clement Greenberg, the critic famous for championing the Abstract Expressionists, "actually went out of his way to say how lousy I was," Katz recalled in an article he wrote for the New Criterion.