“I also love what a simple black dress says about the woman who wears it.”
—Calvin KleinPainted in 2009, Alex Katz’s Nine Women 6 features his friend Yvonne Force Villareal in an elegant black dress against a vivid yellow backdrop, epitomizing Katz’s signature style of exploring portraiture in bold, simplified forms and a monochromatic palette.ⁱ Yvonne Force Villareal is the co-founder of Art Production Fund — a non-profit art organization dedicated to commissioning ambitious public art projects — and the wife of artist Leo Villareal. Forming an immediate bond with Katz in Madrid in the early 1990s, Yvonne quickly became one of Katz’s muses and most painted models after his wife, Ada Katz.^ii,iii Over the years, Katz has depicted Yvonne in more than twenty works, including prints, cutouts, and paintings, each piece uncovering a new dimension of her persona.

The work is part of Katz’s Nine Women series (2009), which depicts nine of his female friends who often model for him: Cecily, Ulla, Sharon, Ruth, Yvonne, Yi, Carmen, Christy, and Oona. Set against the same yellow background, each woman poses almost identically in a relaxed yet graceful demeanor, casually leaning towards the edge of the image with her left arm resting across her waist and her right forearm bent upward in the air. Despite the uniformity in posture, each woman’s individuality shines through the unique variations of the little black dress. In her portrait, Yvonne wears a form-fitting, sleeveless black dress with a low, square neckline that delicately accentuates her sleek, classic silhouette. Paired with pointed black high heels, the outfit exudes an air of poised and confident elegance, which reflects her sophisticated persona and influential role in the art world. By using a reduced graphic language to capture the very essence of the women in the series, Katz invites viewers to explore how subtle differences in attire reveal distinct characters and personalities.

A detail of the present work.

The black dress has been a recurring theme in Katz’s oeuvre. This central motif can be traced back to one of his most iconic early paintings, The Black Dress (1960), which portrays his wife Ada in six different perspectives wearing a classic black shift dress that encapsulates timeless sophistication. Now a highlight of the Museum Brandhorst’s collection in Munich, this piece set a precedent for Katz’s fascination with the black dress. As Katz revisited the theme in 2009 with his Nine Women series, he expanded upon it in 2015 and created the Black Dress series, which features nine larger-than-life-sized screenprints of female figures in the same composition but with cleaner and more defined lines. This trajectory of development not only underscores the interconnected nature of Katz’s painting and printmaking practices but also suggests that the earlier paintings might be viewed as exploratory, almost preparatory stages. These initial works set the conceptual and visual groundwork for the screenprints, thereby enhancing their significance and uniqueness as integral steps in the artist’s continuous exploration of the black dress motif.

Calvin Klein, captivated by the 2015 Black Dress screenprints, praised the work in the exhibition catalogue foreword: “I love what a simple black dress says about the woman who wears it... His portraits, with their strong color fields and clean lines, while seemingly simple, are profoundly expressive and capture the essence of his subjects perfectly.”^iv The Nine Women series (2009) also resonates with Klein’s observations, as each portrait carries a distinct sense of individuality through the stylistic variations of the black dresses.

ⁱ “Inside the Iconic World of Yvonne Force Villareal,” Art She Says, September 6, 2023, online.

ⁱⁱ Erin Michelle Newberg, “The Cultural Crusader,” Lifestyles South Florida, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ Noor Brara, “‘It Was Very Much That Kind of Art-World Romance’: Yvonne Force and Leo Villareal on How They Met, and the Joys of a Creative Marriage,” Artnet, December 5, 2019, online.

^iv Alex Katz and Calvin Klein, Alex Katz: Black Dress, St. Louis, 2015, n.p.
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