Alex Katz: New Paintings and Sculptures
At a certain point in a career as long and accomplished as Alex Katz’s, one hopefully reckons to ask if that artist has begun to transcend themselves: where they become, in effect, “more themselves” (arguably a form of inner transcendence) or simply a representation of such. Katz, who’ll celebrate his 92nd birthday in July, has staked out a long settled stylistic position as a painter. Because of this, it could be said that he is only really answerable to his own mind.
He might easily abandon himself to the entitled caprice of “the master” or slide into solipsistic repetition of past innovation. Instead, in the eminently cool painterly poker game he’s played opposite himself for over 60 years, he’s constantly upped the ante on his “lucky” hand: his strategic success in capturing, in his words, “the immediate present” suffused with “quick light.”
His most recent show is split between figural work and landscapes. A series of dancing female nudes, set on a fairly consistent lime green background on the first floor of the gallery, represents what Katz has titled his “Homage to Degas” series (all dated 2018). It seems appropriate for the artist to reference Degas, in that his own depictions of figural groupings, like Degas’s, have tended to be set in oblique relation to the picture plane. Both Katz and Degas have shared an acute awareness of photographically inspired camera angles and cropping to heighten diagonal tension and lateral balance in their compositions.
Katz, however, is the more “classical” of the two in the sense that he has also often chosen the full frontal view, where the subject aligns, almost confrontationally, parallel with the picture plane. This flipping back and forth between the archaically tectonic and the photographically oblique has been one of Katz’s signature strategies for keeping his familiar representational object matter (mostly family, friends, lived- in landscapes) abstractly engaging and renewed.
In his depiction of nude female dancers he privileges the straight on approach, lending the series, taken as a whole, a frieze-like quality. For example, Homage to Degas 6 presents simultaneously as a stylistic quotation from both an 18th Dynasty Egyptian processional stele and the sequential progression of an Edward Muybridge photograph of human locomotion.
Flipping again more toward the naturalistic are Homage to Degas (10 and 16) in which a “split/screen” composition catches the model in a similar stretching pose combined with a more formal dance pose: effectively a “before and during” parallax view. In Homage to Degas (2, 5 and 7) one sees a more direct relation to how Degas himself radically cropped his dancer’s poses to precariously triangulate the compositional proportions between figure and ground, thereby lending a visual analog to the poise and balance of the model.
With Homage to Degas 14, Katz strikes a complex balance between a series of five “jump-cuts,” the nude model’s torqueing progress, and the glancing light off of her back and side which sets up a complementary rhythm of its own. The artist has a long association with dance, from his earliest collaborations and paintings (beginning circa 1960) with Paul Taylor up to more recent work such as his “Face The Music” series (circa 2010-11). The “Homage to Degas” series, therefore, does represent a continuation of that interest, yet their compositional intervals are much more truncated and compressed.
There is also a sculptural aspect to this show of mostly painting with the inclusion of a series of cut-out sculptures which reprise another long standing format for the artist. These are mostly female figures related to the Homage to Degas series, but also include a few headshot portraits: including one of the artist’s wife Ada, and another of a male and female couple in conversational face off . All are quite flat and fabricated in mirrored stainless steel.
These newly minted iterations of past Katzian figural tropes help to figuratively (and literally) ground the show in their see through solidity. Like pop-up drawings, they are reminiscent of the “cartoons,” or pierced and then pounced sketches the artist typically employs to get an image onto a canvas before commencing to paint.
Katz deepens the sense of an internal transcendence—his “more self”—in the large scale landscapes on display on the 4th and 2nd floors of the gallery. Two canvases in particular stand out in this respect. Each measuring a monumental 8 by 18 feet, Twilight and Twilight 2, (both 2018) ostensibly present deep wood thickets backlit by crepuscular greys and reds respectively. These paintings represent a real leap by Katz into a potentially treacherous conceptual tangle for an artist who has long maintained a razor’s edge relation between representational subjects and their cool painterly translation. Here his object matter coalesces into pure, hot, painterly energy.
Dense overlapping and recursive brushstrokes held in pictorial suspension by dark, contra- leaning verticals in Twilight 2 enact similarly the allover intensity and internal tension of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952). Katz’s brushstroke, especially in the last decade, has been possessed of a certain kind of sumi-e spirit: that Japanese tradition of black ink painting related to calligraphy that favors the spontaneously beautiful brushstroke, typically tied to natural subjects yet gained from years of rigorous academic study.
This type of one- to- one relationship between nature and its spontaneous depiction is more readily seen in a painting like Crosslight (2019) in which gently bending trees seem traced out almost effortlessly by light green and white brushstrokes descending light on a dark ground. While in Twilight and Twilight 2 one can still recognize Katz’s characteristic technical facility in delineating a pine bough or a birch sapling with such summary grace, there wells up in these particular works a knotty impatience which feels quite different.
Another imposing work on the 4th floor, a full 10 by 14.5 feet in dimension, is Blue Night (2018). In it a hulking mass of landscape looms against a deep blue ground, giving the impression of a summit of insurmountable indeterminacy. It would be logical to conjecture Katz’s advanced age as corollary to both the subjects (twilight, night) and the execution (urgent, unbound) of these paintings but that would be too summary a conclusion.
More accurate is the sense that the immediate present for this “cool” artist has become more immediate. It is this “more immediate” that comprises the artist’s transcendence: a consolidation of an inner artistic self, one more finely attuned to the electric charge of painterly immanence. “Fast light,” after all, can be taken as a metaphor for an acceleration of synaptic conductivity. The painterly rules that Katz has, with nervy determination, set up for himself over many years (and which have served him so well) seem, with these works, on the verge of giddy collapse into uncircumscribed experience.
The hot evidence of the artist’s own inexorable presence (his transcendent “nature”) seethes within these latter three canvases. They are no longer elegant amalgams of Katzian givens. They are the artist sacrificing these, and in the process giving way, not to any heroic departure, but to a matter of fact return to painting in itself.
- 1. Matthew Buckley Smith, excerpt from The Dark Woods, from Dirge for an Imaginary World Able Muse Press, 2011.
by Tom McGlynn
Brooklyn Rail, June 2019
Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927. In 1928, at the outset of the Depression, his family moved to St. Albans, a diverse suburb of Queens that had sprung up between the two world wars. Katz was raised by his Russian émigré parents, both of whom were interested in poetry and the arts, his mother having been an actress in Yiddish Theater. Katz attended Woodrow Wilson High School for its unique program that allowed him to devote his mornings to academics and his afternoons to the arts. In 1946, Katz entered The Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan.
At Cooper Union, Katz studied painting under Morris Kantor and was trained in Modern art theories and techniques. Upon graduating in 1949, Katz was awarded a scholarship for summer study at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine, a grant that he would renew the following summer.
During his years at Cooper Union, Katz had been exposed primarily to modern art and was taught to paint from drawings. Skowhegan encouraged him to paint 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.”
Katz’s first one-person show was held at the Roko Gallery in 1954. Katz had begun to develop a circle of acquaintances within the second generation New York School painters and their allies in the other arts. He counted among his friends the figurative painters Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers, photographer Rudolph Burckhardt, and poets John Ashbery, Edwin Denby, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler.
From 1955 to 1959, usually following a day of painting, Katz made small collages of figures in landscapes from hand-colored strips of delicately cut paper. In the late 1950s, he made a decision to attempt greater realism in his paintings. He became increasingly interested in portraiture and painted his friends and in particular his wife and muse, Ada. Katz began using monochrome backgrounds, which would become a defining characteristic of his style, anticipating Pop Art and separating him from gestural figure painters and the New Perceptual Realism.
In 1959, Katz made his first painted cutout. At first these were cut out from canvas and mounted on contoured wood; soon, he began painting them directly onto the cut wood. In the 1960s, he shifted to painting directly on shaped aluminum sheets, a practice which has continued throughout his career, forming a series of freestanding or wall-mounted portraits that exist in actual space.
In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. In 1965, he also embarked on a prolific career in printmaking. Katz would go on to produce many editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and linoleum cut.
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. In the 1980s, Katz took on a new subject in his work: fashion models in designer clothing.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Katz focused much of his attention on large landscape paintings, which he characterizes as “environmental.” Rather than observing a scene from afar, the viewer feels enveloped by nearby nature. Katz began each of these canvases with “an idea of the landscape, a conception,” trying to find the image in nature afterwards.
In his landscape paintings, Katz loosened the edges of the forms, executing the works with greater painterliness than before in these allover canvases. In 1986, Katz began painting a series of night pictures—a departure from the sunlit landscapes he had previously painted, forcing him to explore a new type of light.
Variations on the theme of light falling through branches appear in Katz’s work throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century. At the beginning of the new millennium, Katz also began painting flowers in profusion, covering canvases in blossoms similar to those he had first explored in the late 1960s, when he painted large close-ups of flowers in solitude or in small clusters.
Beginning in 2010, Katz re-framed his subject matter, employing more drastic cropping of individual portraits. He also began composing multiple portraits using tightly cropped images of the same subject sequenced across the linen.
Over the last few years, Katz has frequently begun his process by taking photographs with his iPhone, which he then prints out, cuts, and collages into compositions. From these maquettes, he may make painted studies or go straight to making a large-scale cartoon, from which he paints an oil on linen. During an extended stay in Pennslyvania from late winter through early summer of 2020, Katz made more than 50 paintings, mainly of flowers and landscapes he saw around him
Alex Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 250 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions internationally since 1951.These exhibitions include: the Whitney Museum of American Art (1986); Brooklyn Museum of Art (1988); Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (1995), Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia (1996); P.S. 1/Institute for Contemporary Art, New York (1997-1998); the Saatchi Gallery, London (1998); Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (2002); The Jewish Museum, New York (2006); National Portrait Gallery, London ( 2010); the Albertina, Vienna (2010); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2012); Tate St. Ives (2012), Guggenheim Bilbao (2015), Serpentine Gallery, London (2016), The Cleveland Museum of Art (2017), Lotte Museum of Art, Seoul (2018), Tate Liverpool (2018), Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2018), Musee de L’Orangerie, Paris (2019), Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2019) and the Fosun Foundation, Shanghai (2020).
The Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz, which opened at the Colby College Museum of Art in1996, presents ongoing exhibitions of its in-depth collection of Katz’s paintings, cutouts, drawings, and prints.
Katz has received numerous accolades throughout his career. Among them, Katz was inducted by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1988. In 1978, Katz received the U.S. Government grant to participate in an educational and cultural exchange with the USSR. Katz was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Painting in 1972.
Works by Alex Katz can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide. Most notably, those in America include: Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Brooklyn Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Des Moines Art Center; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Additionally, Katz’s work can be found in the Albertina (Austria), Museum Moderne Kunst (Austria), the Ateneum Taidemuso (Finland), the Sara Hildén Art Museum (Finland), Museum Brandhorst (Germany), the Bayerische Museum (Germany), Fondation Louis Vuitton (France), Israel Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Japan), Berardo Collection (Portugal), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Spain), IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez (Spain), the Nationalgalerie (Germany), and the Tate Gallery (England), among others.
- 1927
- Born July 24 in Brooklyn, New York.
- 1928
- Moves to St. Albans, Queens.
- 1946-49
- Studies at The Cooper Union, New York.
- 1949-50
- Studies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine.
- 1954
- First one-person show at Roko Gallery, New York.
- 1955
- Makes first collages.
- 1968
- Moves to present home and studio in New York.
- 1974
- Alex Katz Prints, a traveling exhibition organized by The Whitney Museum of American Art.
- 1986
- Alex Katz, a traveling retrospective exhibition organized by The Whitney Museum of American Art.
- 1988
- Alex Katz: A Print Retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
- 1995
- Alex Katz: American Landscape at Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, Germany.
- 1996
- Alex Katz at I.V.A.M. Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia, Spain.
- Alex Katz: A Drawing Retrospective, a traveling exhibition at Munson-Williams Proctor Institute, Utica, New York.
- Alex Katz Under the Stars: American Landscapes 1951-1995, organized by the Institute for Contemporary Art/P.S. 1 Museum.
- 1998
- Alex Katz: Twenty-Five Years of Painting at The Saatchi Collection, London, England, January 15 – April 12.
- 1999
- Alex Katz at Galleria Civica Di Arte Contemporanea, Trento, Italy, November – January.
- 2000
- Regarding Alex Katz at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, July 15 – September 10.
- 2001
- Alex Katz Small Paintings traveling exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
- 2002
- Alex Katz- In Your Face at Kunst-Und Ausstellungshalle Der Bundesrepublik, Bonn, Germany, May 9 – August 18.
- 2003
- Alex Katz – Cutouts at Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, February 13 – April 27.
- 2004
- Alex Katz: Cartoons and Paintings at the Albertina Museum Vienna, Austria, December 16, 2004 – February 20, 2005.
- 2005
- Alex Katz at the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Malaga, Spain, March 4 – June 12.
- Alex Katz’ Collages at the Colby College Art Museum, Waterville, Maine, June 27 – September 28.
- 2006
- Alex Katz: The Sixties at PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York, NY, April 27 – June 17.
- Alex Katz Paints Ada 1957-2005 at The Jewish Museum, New York, NY, October 27, 2006 – March 18, 2007.
- 2007
- Alex Katz: New York at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, February 27 – May 20.
- 2009
- Alex Katz: An American Way Of Seeing traveling exhibition organized by the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland; Musée Grenoble, Grenoble and the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, Germany.
- 2010
- Alex Katz Portraits at The National Portrait Gallery, London, May 13 – September 21.
- Alex Katz Prints at the Albertina, Vienna, May 28 – September 19.
- Alex Katz: Prints, Paintings, Cutouts at the Kunsthalle Würth, Schwäbisch Hall, Germany, October 5, 2010 – April 3, 2011.
- Alex Katz at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, December 16, 2010 – December 11, 2011.2011
Alex Katz at the Museum Ostwall, Dortmund, Germany, January 20, 2011 – April 9, 2012.
Alex Katz: Naked Beauty at the Kestnergesellschaft Hanover, November 25, 2011 – February 5, 2012.
Alex Katz: Give Me Tomorrow at the Tate St. Ives, May 19, 2012 – September 23, 2012 and at the Turner Contemporary, Margate, October 6, 2012 – January 13, 2013.
- Alex Katz: Maine/New York at Colby College Musem of Art, Maine. July 14, 2012 – December 30th 2012.2013
Alex Katz: Landscapes at theMuseum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, March 7, 2013 – May 12, 2013.
Alex Katz: New York/ Maine Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, March 9, 2013 – July 7, 2013.
Alex Katz / Felix Valloton Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne , March 23, 2013 – June 9, 2013.2014
ARTIST ROOMS Alex Katz at theTate Modern, London, April 26, 2014 – March 1, 2015.
Alex Katz: Cartoons, Drawings, Paintings at the Albertina, Vienna, May 28, 2014 – Sept 29 2014.2015
Alex Katz: This is Now, at theHigh Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 21, 2015 – September 26, 2015 and at the
Guggenheim, Bilbao, October 23, 2015 – February 7th, 2016.
Brand-New & Terrific: Alex Katz in the 1950’s at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, July 11, 2015 – October 18, 2015.
Alex Katz at the Met, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 8, 2015 – June 26, 2016.2016
Alex Katz: Quick Light at theSerpentine Gallery, London, June 2, 2016 – September 11, 2016.2017
Brand-New & Terrific: Alex Katz in the 1950’s at the Cleveland Museum of Art, April 30, 2017 – August 6, 2017.2018
ARTISTS ROOMS: Alex Katz at theTate Liverpool, Liverpool, England, November 23, 2018 – March 17, 2019.
Alex Katz at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany, December 6, 2018 – April 22, 2019.
Alex Katz: Models and Dancers at theLotte Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea, April 26, 2018 – July 23, 2018.2019
Contemporary Counterpoint / Alex Katz. Water Lilies- Homage to Monet series, 2009-2010 at theMusee de l”Orangerie, Paris, France, May 14, 2019 – September 2, 2019.THE COLLECTION OF THE FONDATION: A VISION FOR PAINTING at theLouis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France, February 20, 2019 – August 26, 2019.
Alex Katz at the Daegu Art Museum, Daegu, South Korea, February 19, 2019 – May 26, 2019.
2020
Alex Katz at the Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, China, May 29, 2020 – August 9, 2020
On October 11, 1996, the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, opened a new wing dedicated to the work of Alex Katz. The artist donated over 400 pieces to the Museum’s collection, including major oil paintings, cutouts, collages, prints, and drawings. The Paul Schupf Gallery for the Works of Alex Katz was made possible through the generosity of Colby Trustee Paul Schupf, who contributed $650,000 toward the cost of the building as well as several large paintings. Colby’s collection now includes nearly 700 Katz works, including his entire print oeuvre. Archive material related to the Katz Collection is held by Colby’s Special Collections and is available to students and researchers by appointment.
The wing was designed by renowned architect Max Gordon to display a revolving selection from the Katz collection. The plans were completed shortly before the architect’s death; it was one of his last commissions. Gordon designed the Saatchi Gallery in London and was described in The New York Times as “an architect internationally known for his mastery of exhibition spaces” and ” the architect of choice for museums, dealers’ galleries, and private collections.”
The wing takes up 10,000 square feet and consists of two 70′ by 36′ galleries, two 36′ by 36′ galleries, and a storage area. Included in Katz’ gift to the Museum are a complete set of his prints through 1993, books, awards, materials from his collaborations with choreographer Paul Taylor, and a set of books, catalogues, and articles on the artist, making it an invaluable research source for scholars and students.
The inaugural exhibition included 17 large paintings, 12 small paintings and oil studies, seven finished portrait drawings, two cutouts, one cartoon, and 24 prints. An illustrated catalogue of the exhibition, with an essay by New York Times critic John Russell, is available from the Museum.
Founded in 1813, Colby is the 12th oldest liberal arts college in the United States. The Colby College Museum of Art was created in 1959. Under the leadership of Hugh Gourley III, who became its first full-time director in 1966, the museum has become widely recognized for its collection and exhibitions. The Museum has an excellent collection of the work of American Modernist John Marin, as well as John Copley, Marsden Hartley, Winslow Homer, Louise Nevelson, Farfield Porter, and contemporary artists Jennifer Bartlett, Francesco Clemente, Chuck Close, Martha Diamond, Rackstraw Downes, Eric Fischl, Yvonne Jacquette, Sol Le Witt, Brice Marden, Joel Shapiro, Hunt Slonem, Mark di Suvero, and Andy Warhol, among others.
Katz first went to Maine 1949, when he received a Cooper Union scholarship to study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Katz was introduced to Colby in the 1950s and has continued his relationship as a summer resident of Lincolnville, Maine, since 1954. Alex Katz received an honorary doctorate from the College in 1984.
USA
Andover, MA, The Addison Gallery
Athens, GA, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia
Atlanta, GA, The High Museum of Art
Boston, MA, The Museum of Fine Arts
Brunswick, ME, Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Buffalo, NY, Albright-Knox Museum
Cambridge, MA, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University
Cambridge, MA, The Albert & Vera List of Arts Center, M.I.T.
Chattanooga, TN, Hunter Museum of American Art
Chicago, IL, The Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, IL, Chicago Arts Club
Cincinnati, OH, Cincinnati Art Museum
Cleveland, OH, Cleveland Museum of Art
Denver, CO, Denver Art Museum
Des Moines, IA, Des Moines Art Center
Detroit, MI, The Detroit Institute of Art
Fort Worth, TX, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Greensboro, NC, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Hamilton, NY, The Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University
Hanover, NH, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College
Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Athenaeum
Honolulu, HI, Honolulu Academy of Art
Houston, TX, Museum of Fine Arts
Houston, TX, Rice Museum, Rice University
Iowa City, IA, University of Iowa Museum of Art
Kansas City, MO, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Kansas City, MO, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Lawrence, KS, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas
Lewiston, ME, Olin Art Center, Bates College
Little Rock, AR, The Arkansas Art Center
Los Angeles, CA, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Madison, WI, Madison Art Center
Malibu, CA, Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University
Manitowoc, WI, Rahr West Museum
Miami, FL, Miami-Dade Community College
Milwaukee, WI, Milwaukee Art Museum
New Orleans, LA, New Orleans Museum of Art
New York, NY, The Brooklyn Museum
New York, NY, The Grey Art Gallery, NYU Art Collection, New York University
New York, NY, The Jewish Museum
New York, NY, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, NY, The Museum of Modern Art
New York, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art
New York, NY, Equitable Life Insurance
New York, NY, American Adacemy and Institute of Arts and Letters
New York, NY, Exxon Corporate Collection
Norfolk, VA, Chrysler Museum
Oberlin, OH, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College
Omaha, NE, Joslyn Art Museum
Philadelphia, PA, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Philadelphia, PA, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Museum of Art
Portland, ME, Portland Museum of Art
Portland, OR, Portland Art Museum
Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Art Museum
Providence, RI, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design
Raleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art
Richmond, VA, Virginia Museum of Fine Art
Rochester, MI, Meadow Brook Art Gallery, Oakland University
Rockland, ME, William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum
Salt Lake City, UT, Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Scranton, PA, Everhart Museum
Seattle, WA, Virginia Wright Fund
Sioux City, IA, Sioux City Art Center
Syracuse, NY, Joe & Emily Loe Art Gallery, Syracuse University
Tampa, FL, University of South Florida Art Galleries
Trenton, NJ, New Jersey State Museum
Utica, NY, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute of Art
Waltham, MA, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
Washington, DC, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Washington, DC, National Collection of Fine Arts
Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art
Washington, DC, National Portrait Gallery
Washington, DC, The Phillips Collection
Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institute
Waterville, ME, Colby College Museum of Art
Wilmington, DE, Delaware Art Museum
Winston-Salem, NC, Wake Forest University
Witchita, KS, Witchita Art Museum
Worcester, MA, Worcester Art Museum
- AUSTRIA
- Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina
- Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst
- CANADA
- Toronto, The Art Gallery of Ontario
- ENGLAND
- London, Saatchi Collection
- London, The Tate Gallery
Middlesbrough, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art - FINLAND
- Helsinki, Atenium Taidemuso
Tampere, Sarah Hilden Museum of Art - FRANCE
Paris, Foundation d’Art Contemporaine - Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou
- GERMANY
- Aachen, Neue Galerie
- Bad Hamburg, Altana Haus Museum
Baden-Baden, Museum Frieder Burda - Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz Nationalgalerie
Cologne, Collection Westdeutsch Spielbank
Kleve, Museum Kurhaus - Künzelsau, Museum Würth
- Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
- Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Moderne Kunst
Munich, Museum Bandhorst - HOLLAND
- Museum Voorlinden
- ISRAEL
- Jerusalem, The Israel Museum
- JAPAN
- Hiroshima, Hiroshima City Museum
- Iwaki, Iwaki City Art Museum
- Tokyo, Museum of Comtemporary Art
- KOREA
- Kyonqiu-Shi, Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art
- LUXEMBURG
- Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art Luxembourg
- MEXICO
- Mexico City, Museo Rufino Tamayo
- PORTUGAL
- Sintra, Berardo Museum Collection
- SCOTLAND
- Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland
- SPAIN
- Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia - Valencia, IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez
- SWITZERLAND
- Lausanne, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Art
- Zurich, Daros Collection