“I also love what a simple black dress says about the woman who wears it”
—Calvin Klein
The black dress has been a recurring theme in Alex Katz’s work throughout his career. Its
appearance as a motif in the artist’s work can be traced back to one of his most iconic early paintings, The Black Dress (1960), which depicts six different perspectives of Katz’s wife, Ada, wearing a classic black shift dress. Decades later, Katz revisited the theme again, depicting women clad in this timeless outfit in a series of paintings executed on door panels. Based on these compositions, the artist then created a series of nine life-sized screenprints in 2015, simply titled Black Dress. Such a trajectory of development emphasises the deeply entwined nature of Katz’s painting and printmaking practices.
Black Dress (2015) features nine of Katz’s female friends: Cecily, Ulla, Sharon, Ruth, Yvonne, Yi, Carmen, Christy, and Oona, who is depicted here. These women often modelled for the artist and, ahead of this project, Katz simply instructed them to wear black high heels and their own variations of a black dress. All the women were then depicted leaning in a near-identical pose against a yellow background. The duplicated poses and uniform outfits evoke a timeless quality, recalling the 1920’s fashion salons of Coco Chanel, who has long been credited as the inventor of the LBD or Little Black Dress.
A firm believer in the power of clothing to convey personality, Calvin Klein wrote the catalogue foreword for an exhibition of Katz’s Black Dress screenprints. Praising Katz’s "strong colour fields and clean lines", Klein also stated that he loved "what a simple black dress says about the woman who wears it." Against flat planes of colour with no individualised body language, Katz’s screenprints visually reiterate Klein’s point. The personalities of each of the artist’s friends shine through in their respective portraits via the stylistic variations of their black dresses.