The Coca Cola Girls series is an excellent example of Alex Katz’s work, which is influenced by pop culture and advertising. Between the 1890s and 1960s, images of bold and even daring girls were an integral part of Coca-Cola’s advertising, which was created to show an idealized American woman. Originally discreet and modest, Coca-Cola Girls gradually changed during World War I with the advent of the pin-up aesthetic to images of confident female soldiers in uniform, and sporty women in casual wear.
These images were practically pre-television advertisements, so they naturally exerted an enormous cultural and social influence on the visual language of the American urban landscape. Alex Katz explains this phenomenon in these words:

That’s Coca-Cola red, from the company’s outdoor signs in the fifties… you know, the blond girl in the red convertible, laughing with unlimited happiness. It’s a romance image, and for me, it has to do with Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider. I could never understand that painting but my mother and Frank O’Hara both flipped over it, so I realized I was missing something. They saw it as a romantic figure, riding from the Black Sea to the Baltic.

Finally, these works deal with an important aspect of American history, as they deconstruct the inherited cultural and economic narratives in relation to the present moment.

Alex Katz’s paintings reflect choreographic movements of the female body, synchronized with the manual application of color based on a Renaissance technique called “pouncing”, which is used to transfer an image from one surface to another. This kind of thorough brushstroke is a demanding physical process and requires repetition, which Katz loves so much.

The homogeneous and strong red in the background contrasts beautifully with the white swimsuits of the exceptionally attractive ladies and thus unfolds the signal effect desired in advertising.

Alex Katz is perhaps best known for his linear and simplified portraits, which are characterized by an economy of gesture or, as the artist describes it, by the rapid passing of things. His paintings focus on the attitude of a present moment, regardless of the specifics of the subject portrayed.

There are numerous historical references in his work, from Japanese block prints, Matisse and Manet to Jackson Pollock and, of course, Pop Art. With the series Coca Cola Girls, however, Alex Katz succeeded in constructing an authentic, hybrid aesthetic that is difficult to categorize.

The history of advertising can tell you a lot about the development of 20th century art, as various companies commissioned artists to develop their visual identity. In the 1960s, Pop Art, which critically examined the effects of consumerism, appeared as a milestone in the American economy.

Starting from this point, the artist Alex Katz, who was formally trained in commercial art, creates dense and colorful narratives composed of a variety of media content: from close-up films to billboards and television commercials.