.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘“Cool.” Some people have it. Some don’t. Some people lose it, some never do’ (Robert Storr)
Alex Katz’s Kym 2 (1989-1990) is an emblematic cropped portrait by the iconic American painter. It unfolds on a monumental canvas more than three metres in width, its titular subject dominating the centre of the composition. Behind her, horizonal bands of sky and sand place the woman at the seaside. She wears a crisp white t-shirt, which draws attention to her pale blue eyes, blushed lips and auburn hair. Against the gently lapping waves and raking sunlight, which illuminates her hair and casts wispy shadows across her face, she wears an expression of serenity and introspection. Depicting a long-time acquaintance of the artist, Kym 2 dates to a period of widespread critical acclaim for Katz, executed a few years following his important mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. It was acquired by Alessandro Grassi shortly after its completion in 1990 and has remained in his collection ever since. In 2018 it was a highlight of Codice Colore, an exhibition of works from the Grassi collection held at the Centro Pecci, Prato.
With its restrained palette of complementary blue and orange, abstracted bands of sand, foam, and sea, and cleanly delineated figure, Kym 2 exemplifies Katz’s deceptively simple style, which has remained remarkably consistent across some seven decades. Reviewing his Whitney retrospective, John Russell described his paintings—which form an expansive record of an artist who has looked hard at the world around him—as ‘art that conceals art’ (J. Russell, ‘Alex Katz and the Art that Conceals its Art’, The New York Times, 14 March 1986). His subjects are invariably family and friends—the artists, poets, fashion models, and intellectuals whose company he keeps in New York City and in coastal Maine, where he spends his summers. The works painted there are among his most distinctive. Katz specialises, suggests Russell, ‘in the look of city people as they take it easy by the sea’ (J. Russell, ibid.). Kym’s simple white t-shirt and minimal bobbed hair, indeed, conjure the effortless cool of the late 1980s and ’90s.
Kym is larger than life yet also extraordinarily true to life. Katz paints the world he knows, so that his oeuvre becomes a kind of visual vernacular of people, propelled by this tension between grand scale and the intimacy of looking. His process seeks to capture the immediacy of sight, beginning with initial oil or ink sketches painted en plein air. In the studio he enlarges this sketch, and with charcoal distils the image into clean lines and planes to create a cartoon, in the tradition of European painting. The final work is faithful to the scale of this drawing and typically executed in a single sitting. Kym 2 fills the viewer’s field of vision, but Katz’s cropped, cinematic composition invites a sense of intimacy. ‘Degas developed cropping to allow that a world existed outside the picture frame,’ Katz has reflected. ‘The modern use of cropping is more like that of a TV. It pushes the forms forward into the room. In my own paintings, cropping is primarily used for drama and forward expansion’ (A. Katz quoted in C. Ratcliff, ‘Among Contemporaries’ in V. Katz, ed., Alex Katz, New York 2020, p. 46).
As an art student at Manhattan’s progressive Cooper Union in the late 1940s, Brooklyn-born Katz came of age as an artist alongside the growth of New York as the centre of modern art. At Cooper he was trained by Morris Kantor in the theories and practices of Modernism, working largely from drawings and in a post-Cubist idiom. But around him, artists such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock were reshaping the cultural landscape. He was inspired by the power of Abstract Expressionism and began to paint on a similarly grand scale, aspiring to match the visual force of billboards. His crisp canvases of uninflected colour also draw on aspects of colour field and hard-edge painting. As Minimal and Conceptual Art took hold across the 1960s and 1970s, however, Katz held firm as a resolutely figurative painter. Fascinated by film and popular culture, his work is often seen as a precursor to Pop, but Katz extends the tradition of Baudelaire more than that of Warhol: he paints, single-mindedly, the world as he sees it. By the time the present work was executed in the late 1980s, painting was back ‘in’ and Katz’s enduring faithfulness to his medium established his name in the canon of contemporary art.
Maine, whose silvery light bathes so many of Katz’s most iconic canvases, was formative in his development as a painter and has remained a driving force behind his practice. He first visited as a young artist, having received a scholarship from Cooper Union to spend the summer after graduation at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In the 1950s he purchased a house in nearby Lincolnville, and since that time has worked consistently between the city and the coast. It was in Maine that Katz painted outdoors for the first time, a result of Skowhegan’s longstanding plein air programme. Like the Impressionists, he was seeking to capture the specific effects of light and the sensation of direct sight. ‘I found I could paint much faster, painting directly’, recalled Katz; ‘… It was like feeling lust for the first time’ (A. Katz quoted in C. Ratcliff, ‘The Art of Alex Katz’, in Alex Katz, London 2005, p. 56). In the studio, he preserves this sense of urgency by painting the final canvas within a single session, wet-on-wet. He has spoken about letting his energy ‘pool’ in the leadup to these sessions, so that the painting of each canvases feels akin to a performance. In Kym 2 Katz’s brush carves fluid wisps of hair across the subject’s face, lifting the deeper brown and orange tones over which it travels. The technique creates a subtle blurred effect, as though the stray strands have been unsettled by a light ocean breeze.
As is typical of Katz’s works, Kym 2 is defined by a sense of ease, elegance and beauty. His monumental canvases extend a thread which reaches back to the sixteenth-century canvases of Titian and Veronese, via the ‘big’ painting of American Abstract Expressionism and widescreen movies of the 1950s. Painting on the heroic scale typically reserved for history painting, or depictions of classical or religious themes, Katz evolved a mode of portraiture true to his contemporary time. ‘This is the highest thing an artist can do,’ reflected Katz, ‘to make something that’s real for his time, where he lives’ (A. Katz in conversation with D. Sylvester, in Alex Katz: Twenty Five Years of Painting, London 1997, p. 22).
Il Senso del Colore: Works from the Alessandro Grassi Collection
‘Colour has always had a great presence in my life, so much so that in the choice of the works colour itself, before anything else … is the dominant element’ (Alessandro Grassi)
Christie’s is honoured to present a selection of works from the Alessandro Grassi Collection, to be offered in sales across Paris and London in October 2025. This occasion marks a rare opportunity to acquire works from one of the most storied collections in Italy.
Alessandro Grassi (1942-2009) was born among colours. His chemist father was a founder of Colorama, a key producer of printing inks, and he would follow into this field, becoming a prominent industrialist in Milan. An elegant and sophisticated man, he began his collection in 1979 with the Transavanguardia: a group of Italian artists who embraced vivid colour, form and symbolism in reaction to the Conceptual and Minimal tendencies of the previous decade. ‘I’m anti-minimalist’, Grassi said. ‘Everything I bought was because it provoked a strong emotion in me at the time.’
Grassi soon became a leading Transavanguardia collector, and expanded into genres from Pop to Spatialism and Arte Povera. He forged close relationships with the eminent art historian Achille Bonito Oliva and the Modena-based gallerist Emilio Mazzoli, from whom he acquired many works, often from the artists’ inaugural exhibitions. He lived among them in an extraordinary art-filled apartment in Milan, documented in the 1993 volume Collezione privata. He lent generously to museum exhibitions, and left a significant bequest to Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART) upon his death. More recently, the collection was celebrated in the 2018 exhibition Codice colore at the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, the city of Grassi’s birth.
Italian art formed the core of the collection. Among the works offered are two paintings by Salvo, who plays with genre and fame in his Paessagio (1984) and 31 Siciliani (1976). Mario Schifano’s magnificent Grande quadro equestre italiano (1978) is another highlight. Widely reproduced—appearing on the cover of Flash Art, and in Schifano’s major retrospective of 2002—it is an exemplary work by the maverick postmodern painter, who drew upon urban experience and deconstructed art-historical tradition.
Elsewhere, Untitled (1989-1991), a rare collaborative tapestry by Mimmo Paladino and Alighiero Boetti, offers a meditation on the infinite, intertwined complexities of existence. Gino de Dominicis’s Untitled (1997-1998), with its red figure set amid a gleaming ground of silver, is a typically enigmatic vision from one of post-war Italy’s most mysterious artists. Grassi did not limit himself to any one medium or category, and developed an international outlook over the years. He was drawn to the bold visual language of Alex Katz, whose Kym 2 (1989-1990), Study for Chance (1990) and Sissel (2000) are among the standout works in this selection. They relate both to American Pop and to the Neo- Expressionist tendency that paralleled Italy’s Transavanguardia. Valley Curtain (project for Colorado) (1972), meanwhile, is a drawing for Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s installation which spanned a Colorado highway with bright orange fabric.
With an exacting eye for colour, mood and expressive power, Grassi assembled a remarkable collection that ranked among the finest in Italy. Together, the works offered paint a picture of the passion and personal feeling with which Grassi pursued his vision, and of the joy and vibrancy that art can bring to life.
Alex Katz’s Kym 2 (1989-1990) is an emblematic cropped portrait by the iconic American painter. It unfolds on a monumental canvas more than three metres in width, its titular subject dominating the centre of the composition. Behind her, horizonal bands of sky and sand place the woman at the seaside. She wears a crisp white t-shirt, which draws attention to her pale blue eyes, blushed lips and auburn hair. Against the gently lapping waves and raking sunlight, which illuminates her hair and casts wispy shadows across her face, she wears an expression of serenity and introspection. Depicting a long-time acquaintance of the artist, Kym 2 dates to a period of widespread critical acclaim for Katz, executed a few years following his important mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. It was acquired by Alessandro Grassi shortly after its completion in 1990 and has remained in his collection ever since. In 2018 it was a highlight of Codice Colore, an exhibition of works from the Grassi collection held at the Centro Pecci, Prato.
With its restrained palette of complementary blue and orange, abstracted bands of sand, foam, and sea, and cleanly delineated figure, Kym 2 exemplifies Katz’s deceptively simple style, which has remained remarkably consistent across some seven decades. Reviewing his Whitney retrospective, John Russell described his paintings—which form an expansive record of an artist who has looked hard at the world around him—as ‘art that conceals art’ (J. Russell, ‘Alex Katz and the Art that Conceals its Art’, The New York Times, 14 March 1986). His subjects are invariably family and friends—the artists, poets, fashion models, and intellectuals whose company he keeps in New York City and in coastal Maine, where he spends his summers. The works painted there are among his most distinctive. Katz specialises, suggests Russell, ‘in the look of city people as they take it easy by the sea’ (J. Russell, ibid.). Kym’s simple white t-shirt and minimal bobbed hair, indeed, conjure the effortless cool of the late 1980s and ’90s.
Kym is larger than life yet also extraordinarily true to life. Katz paints the world he knows, so that his oeuvre becomes a kind of visual vernacular of people, propelled by this tension between grand scale and the intimacy of looking. His process seeks to capture the immediacy of sight, beginning with initial oil or ink sketches painted en plein air. In the studio he enlarges this sketch, and with charcoal distils the image into clean lines and planes to create a cartoon, in the tradition of European painting. The final work is faithful to the scale of this drawing and typically executed in a single sitting. Kym 2 fills the viewer’s field of vision, but Katz’s cropped, cinematic composition invites a sense of intimacy. ‘Degas developed cropping to allow that a world existed outside the picture frame,’ Katz has reflected. ‘The modern use of cropping is more like that of a TV. It pushes the forms forward into the room. In my own paintings, cropping is primarily used for drama and forward expansion’ (A. Katz quoted in C. Ratcliff, ‘Among Contemporaries’ in V. Katz, ed., Alex Katz, New York 2020, p. 46).
As an art student at Manhattan’s progressive Cooper Union in the late 1940s, Brooklyn-born Katz came of age as an artist alongside the growth of New York as the centre of modern art. At Cooper he was trained by Morris Kantor in the theories and practices of Modernism, working largely from drawings and in a post-Cubist idiom. But around him, artists such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock were reshaping the cultural landscape. He was inspired by the power of Abstract Expressionism and began to paint on a similarly grand scale, aspiring to match the visual force of billboards. His crisp canvases of uninflected colour also draw on aspects of colour field and hard-edge painting. As Minimal and Conceptual Art took hold across the 1960s and 1970s, however, Katz held firm as a resolutely figurative painter. Fascinated by film and popular culture, his work is often seen as a precursor to Pop, but Katz extends the tradition of Baudelaire more than that of Warhol: he paints, single-mindedly, the world as he sees it. By the time the present work was executed in the late 1980s, painting was back ‘in’ and Katz’s enduring faithfulness to his medium established his name in the canon of contemporary art.
Maine, whose silvery light bathes so many of Katz’s most iconic canvases, was formative in his development as a painter and has remained a driving force behind his practice. He first visited as a young artist, having received a scholarship from Cooper Union to spend the summer after graduation at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In the 1950s he purchased a house in nearby Lincolnville, and since that time has worked consistently between the city and the coast. It was in Maine that Katz painted outdoors for the first time, a result of Skowhegan’s longstanding plein air programme. Like the Impressionists, he was seeking to capture the specific effects of light and the sensation of direct sight. ‘I found I could paint much faster, painting directly’, recalled Katz; ‘… It was like feeling lust for the first time’ (A. Katz quoted in C. Ratcliff, ‘The Art of Alex Katz’, in Alex Katz, London 2005, p. 56). In the studio, he preserves this sense of urgency by painting the final canvas within a single session, wet-on-wet. He has spoken about letting his energy ‘pool’ in the leadup to these sessions, so that the painting of each canvases feels akin to a performance. In Kym 2 Katz’s brush carves fluid wisps of hair across the subject’s face, lifting the deeper brown and orange tones over which it travels. The technique creates a subtle blurred effect, as though the stray strands have been unsettled by a light ocean breeze.
As is typical of Katz’s works, Kym 2 is defined by a sense of ease, elegance and beauty. His monumental canvases extend a thread which reaches back to the sixteenth-century canvases of Titian and Veronese, via the ‘big’ painting of American Abstract Expressionism and widescreen movies of the 1950s. Painting on the heroic scale typically reserved for history painting, or depictions of classical or religious themes, Katz evolved a mode of portraiture true to his contemporary time. ‘This is the highest thing an artist can do,’ reflected Katz, ‘to make something that’s real for his time, where he lives’ (A. Katz in conversation with D. Sylvester, in Alex Katz: Twenty Five Years of Painting, London 1997, p. 22).
Il Senso del Colore: Works from the Alessandro Grassi Collection
‘Colour has always had a great presence in my life, so much so that in the choice of the works colour itself, before anything else … is the dominant element’ (Alessandro Grassi)
Christie’s is honoured to present a selection of works from the Alessandro Grassi Collection, to be offered in sales across Paris and London in October 2025. This occasion marks a rare opportunity to acquire works from one of the most storied collections in Italy.
Alessandro Grassi (1942-2009) was born among colours. His chemist father was a founder of Colorama, a key producer of printing inks, and he would follow into this field, becoming a prominent industrialist in Milan. An elegant and sophisticated man, he began his collection in 1979 with the Transavanguardia: a group of Italian artists who embraced vivid colour, form and symbolism in reaction to the Conceptual and Minimal tendencies of the previous decade. ‘I’m anti-minimalist’, Grassi said. ‘Everything I bought was because it provoked a strong emotion in me at the time.’
Grassi soon became a leading Transavanguardia collector, and expanded into genres from Pop to Spatialism and Arte Povera. He forged close relationships with the eminent art historian Achille Bonito Oliva and the Modena-based gallerist Emilio Mazzoli, from whom he acquired many works, often from the artists’ inaugural exhibitions. He lived among them in an extraordinary art-filled apartment in Milan, documented in the 1993 volume Collezione privata. He lent generously to museum exhibitions, and left a significant bequest to Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART) upon his death. More recently, the collection was celebrated in the 2018 exhibition Codice colore at the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, the city of Grassi’s birth.
Italian art formed the core of the collection. Among the works offered are two paintings by Salvo, who plays with genre and fame in his Paessagio (1984) and 31 Siciliani (1976). Mario Schifano’s magnificent Grande quadro equestre italiano (1978) is another highlight. Widely reproduced—appearing on the cover of Flash Art, and in Schifano’s major retrospective of 2002—it is an exemplary work by the maverick postmodern painter, who drew upon urban experience and deconstructed art-historical tradition.
Elsewhere, Untitled (1989-1991), a rare collaborative tapestry by Mimmo Paladino and Alighiero Boetti, offers a meditation on the infinite, intertwined complexities of existence. Gino de Dominicis’s Untitled (1997-1998), with its red figure set amid a gleaming ground of silver, is a typically enigmatic vision from one of post-war Italy’s most mysterious artists. Grassi did not limit himself to any one medium or category, and developed an international outlook over the years. He was drawn to the bold visual language of Alex Katz, whose Kym 2 (1989-1990), Study for Chance (1990) and Sissel (2000) are among the standout works in this selection. They relate both to American Pop and to the Neo- Expressionist tendency that paralleled Italy’s Transavanguardia. Valley Curtain (project for Colorado) (1972), meanwhile, is a drawing for Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s installation which spanned a Colorado highway with bright orange fabric.
With an exacting eye for colour, mood and expressive power, Grassi assembled a remarkable collection that ranked among the finest in Italy. Together, the works offered paint a picture of the passion and personal feeling with which Grassi pursued his vision, and of the joy and vibrancy that art can bring to life.