Alex Katz: First Sight

Alex Katz: First Sight is a substantial visual monograph that presents over 500 working drawings by Alex Katz—offering an exceptional view into the artist’s creative process.

Rather than focusing solely on finished paintings, the book reproduces preparatory sketches and working drawings in facsimile at full scale. This allows the viewer to literally “look over Katz’s shoulder” and see how forms, gestures, and observational decisions emerge on paper before they are resolved in paint. These drawings, spanning from the early 1950s to the present, reveal Katz’s method of recording contours, overlapping motifs, movement, and attitude with immediacy and clarity. The book’s title First Sight captures this focus on visual observation—where seeing precedes all conceptual elaboration. The drawings function not as drafts but as essential works in their own right: raw, direct, and expressive of the artist’s engagement with subject, line, and composition. The text by Jean-Christophe Ammann situates these works within Katz’s broader oeuvre and highlights how such drawings illuminate his later achievements as one of America’s most significant painters of portraiture and landscape.