A Trip To Maine With Alex Katz, The 99-Year-Old Artist Who Doesn’t Stop

Being with Alex Katz in Lincolnville, Maine, is unlike anything else. Only 10 minutes from the scenic harbour of Camden, the landscape is rural without being rural – in the woods, but just a short drive to seaside life. The winding road, flanked by all those tall, standing-up-straight pines that are present in so many of Alex’s paintings, leads to the little beach where my late husband Tad and I and Alex (now 99) and his wife Ada ate lobster rolls, laughing and talking, just eight years ago. Things are different this time. Tad isn’t with us. Neither is Ada – she doesn’t come up from the city anymore. But her presence is everywhere.

I wanted to go to Maine again to see Alex and that bright-yellow house that he and Ada went to almost every summer since they married in 1958. When I arrive at 11 one August morning, he is sitting at a round wooden table that has been placed on the green grass outside, wearing an orange baseball cap, drinking coffee and having elevenses with his poet son Vincent and his wife Vivien (who runs the studio), their 27-year-old twin sons Isaac and Oliver and their girlfriends Anna and Kaylie, and Eno (after Brian Eno), Vincent and Vivien’s ever-present dachshund. It’s a family affair. It could also be an Alex Katz painting, if only his forever muse Ada was there.

I join the group, and it’s as if no time has passed since Alex and I last spoke. “The thing about being up here is, we don’t have to worry about the parties we’ve missed,” he says, laughing. “I sleep and work.”

He speaks pithily – not unlike his paintings, a bit Hemingway-esque – and he’s funny. Comes out with the unexpected. Gets a kick out of what he says. Laughs at it, as if it surprises him. “I tried a hearing aid,” he tells me. “Lost it on the way home. Tried it again, lost that one too. They’re bad for painting.”

“How are they bad?” I ask.

“You don’t have to hear to paint.”

His studio is a short walk across the property, looking onto Coleman Pond, though these days he is painting in the bright-blue barn studio attached to the house. Alex and primary colours are on good terms with each other. I think of that unforgettable portrait of Ada against a bright-red background that belongs to the Whitney Museum. There’s another big close-up of Ada’s face (this time in a black bathing cap) against a bright-red background here, hanging in the barn.

“I spent a lot of time fixing up this house,” he tells me. “The thing was about to fall down. I bought it for nothing – $1,200 – and the neighbours thought I got rooked.” He purchased it with the artists Lois Dodd and Jean Cohen, his wife at the time. “It was a half acre here and 20 acres down the road.” He tells me how the building was originally a rum store two miles away, owned by a blacksmith, and they had to drag it here and put it on a new foundation. “But it didn’t fit,” he adds. “About 20 years later we got a grown man to finish the foundation. Until that time, it leaked.”

Alex doesn’t live the way so many other famous artists do. No trappings of the money his paintings have brought and continue to bring. He sleeps in a twin bed in a monastic room off the tiny living room. He built the kitchen cabinets himself decades ago, and the potato print wallpaper in the entryway was made by Alex and Lois Dodd. Little has changed, either in the house here or in the SoHo loft he and Ada have lived in since the 1960s – the same space I remember from 1982, when I first met Alex.

“The past couple of years have been the biggest production of my life,” Alex tells me. “I did 150 paintings. Good size.” He has been painting pictures of the beach – dark, compressed images, very different from all those verdant green Maine canvases. He’s in his late period. Like late de Kooning, the picture plane has been emptied of people, just Alex and his canvases. He first made his mark by ignoring emotion, character, mood. He paints the surface, outside appearances.

“This winter I didn’t care if I ever did another painting,” he continues. “I was inspired by a Monet in The Metropolitan Museum.” He’s talking about The Met’s very large 1919 Monet, Water Lilies. “I had a show with water paintings in Venice. I don’t think people got them. They love looking at them, but they don’t understand what they’re about. Water has three properties: weight, transparency, and motion. They viewed the paintings as illustrations of water, but no one understood what I was doing.”

What he was doing, of course, was not standing still. Moving forward. He’s curious, forever reinventing himself and learning more about what he loves most– making a new picture, surprising himself, every time. I’m struck by his persistence, his singularity. His career has shifted in many ways, yet it stays the same – flowers and trees and landscapes and people and, especially, Ada.

At 99, Alex Katz is wiry and fit. Does 300 push-ups a day. (He claims.) Goes to galleries. And he’s still reinventing his game, not just giving people what they think they want to see in an Alex Katz picture. He’s painting for himself, forcing us to see only the essentials, just the way he does.

“To be a painter, you have to be aggressive,” he explains. “My parents always argued. So I was brought up to be aggressive.” Katz grew up in St. Albans, a vibrant neighbourhood in Queens, rich with Black history and jazz culture (Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and John Coltrane lived there), as well as Irish, English, German, and Italian families. Only one other family in the neighbourhood was Jewish, and they lived across the street.

His parents were Isaac and Sima Katz, who met in Russia. Sima turned Isaac down when he first asked her to marry him and became a star in the Yiddish theatre on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, performing under the stage name Ella Marion, after she emigrated to New York. Isaac emigrated separately and worked (once the couple reunited) for Sima’s brother in the wholesale coffee business. Alex’s mother was about 10 years younger than his father. “She read about people like Isaac in novels but had never met anyone like him,” Alex says. “He changed his clothes three times a day and had muscles on top of muscles.” When he asked her the second time, “he knocked her up, and I’m the result.” Alex’s father was a snappy dresser who knew high style and high culture when he saw it. “An apprentice aristocrat,” Alex says and adds, “a Jew with muscles.” And then: “The difference was, he was intellectual. He was very smart.” He wanted Alex to go into business with him, but Alex wanted to be an artist. “He said, ‘Okay, I’ll work on your kid brother.’ I thought that was the nicest thing.”

“I was trying, trying, trying to do something ordinary,” Alex writes in his art autobiography, Invented Symbols. “Everything in our house was so damn bizarre.” Everyone, especially his father, was always painting and repainting the rooms of their house in strange colours. There was a pink sunroom decorated with triangles. Alex couldn’t stand it anymore. So he painted his bedroom beige with brown trim.

Alex is a quintessential New Yorker. He read a lot, had a good deal of independence growing up, and his parents didn’t mind when he used his crayons to draw on the walls. He went to the Woodrow Wilson Vocational High School in Queens so he could do art “half the day.” After graduating from the Cooper Union art school in Manhattan, he chose Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture over Yale’s summer school program. “I was sick and tired of listening to teachers, and Albers” – Josef Albers was head of Yale’s art school – “had a real point of view, and I didn’t want a point of view. I wasn’t interested in that.” Later, he chose maverick Gavin Brown’s gallery over Larry Gagosian’s.

When Alex started painting in the 1950s, Pop art was just being born – New York was abuzz with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. But Alex went the other way; he was exposed to figurative art growing up, and that’s how he painted. His work was unapologetically stubborn, like him. (His lunch every day for 15 years was a can of sardines, a slice of tomato, lettuce, and one piece of bread.) Alex’s friends were poets – Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and the poet-dance critic Edwin Denby, who introduced Alex to choreographer Paul Taylor. For Alex, this led to a decades-long collaboration, designing sets and costumes for the Paul Taylor Dance Company.

Alex Katz didn’t really become Alex Katz until the fall of 1957 when he met Ada Del Moro. He was struggling to find his way, destroying scores of paintings along the way. It’s the only time he seems to have lost his self-confidence, or to have been “off the bubble,” to use his words. Alex and Ada – a research biologist at Sloan Kettering – were married in February, three months after they met, when he was 30 and she was 29. He’s made more than 1,000 portraits of her over their nearly 70-year marriage. As art historian Irving Sandler wrote in 1998, Ada “is woman, wife, mother, muse, model, sociable hostess, myth, icon, and New York goddess.” She is many different people in his hands.

We’ve been talking for hours when Alex tells me a story about his father – who died in a car accident when Alex was 16. Alex “went out with another guy” one day as a teen. “And we ran a bicycle 20 miles and made watercolours.” I like his use of the word “ran” instead of “rode” – much more visual, more action. Very Alex. “Then we came home. We showed them to my father. The other guy wanted to be a commercial artist. My father said, ‘You’re going to be a great commercial artist.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘You’re going to be a fine artist.’ ” He laughs. We all laugh.

He continues: “And then my father ended by saying, ‘Why do you have to ride 20 miles to make this? Why don’t you build your own backyard?’ I couldn’t see the backyard at all. And then, the final thing was, ‘don’t paint details.’” There it is – don’t paint details. The Alex Katz vision, all right there, a gift from his father, just before Isaac died. He’s really enjoying telling the story he’s told many times before. It’s his creation myth, the making of Alex Katz, the artist. “When he said, ‘Paint your backyard,’ I knew he was right.”

It’s the end of the day, and we’re finishing a dinner of Thai takeout, sitting around the wooden table outside the yellow house. He’s the paterfamilias, surrounded by family. He’s still doing what he wants to do.

Artworks: © 2026 Alex Katz/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Visuals Editor: Paige Viti.