On October 2, 2019, a new world record was set at the London auction house Phillips for a painting by the American Pop Art artist Alex Katz. The painting Blue Umbrella I from 1972 sold for £3,375,000 / US$ 4.1 million.

In the midst of a shower of rain, this graceful woman always seems to rest in her serenity, while her thoughts have long since sunk into another world. The masterpiece Blue Umbrella 2 by Alex Katz tells the story of a timelessly beautiful woman who captivates us with her melancholic gaze. Like in a film scene she stands in the rain and enchants us with her powerful expression, which tries to tell us so much.
It is Ada, the wife of Alex Katz, whom he describes as his greatest muse. Since the marriage of the two in 1958, he has painted her over 200 times. For him she is the embodiment of a perfect, timeless inspiration.
In simple elegance she enchants us with her complexity, which magically combines vulnerability, profundity and poetry. For a brief moment she takes our breath away and we can do nothing else but look into her sad, pensive eyes. Raindrops flow through the whole picture, but the young woman finds refuge under a dark blue umbrella, which seems to carry her off into another world. Her gaze glides cautiously and somewhat shyly past the viewer, as if she did not want to look directly into his eyes. Dressed in an elegant black French trench coat and an orange-blue headscarf, she looks as stylistically confident as a film star from the 60s. But she is not a diva who appears arrogant and aloof. Rather, she transports a touch of grace and melancholy. Her dark, almond-shaped eyes give us a little insight into the deep inner life of this multi-layered personality, who wants to create distance between her and the outside world through her reservedness. This makes her seem somewhat absent and unapproachable, difficult to access for others. It almost seems as if she doesn’t even notice the torrential rain around her.

Alex Katz / Pioneer of Pop Art

Alex Katz is especially famous for his figurative paintings: The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was born in New York in 1927. As a pioneer of Pop Art, he always concentrated on the essentials and early on, he dealt with simplified forms and contrasting color compositions. His art is diverse, but always has beauty as its central theme. The artist can now look back on more than 200 solo and around 500 group exhibitions; his diverse works are part of over 100 collections worldwide. Alex Katz lives and works in New York and Maine.