American Art Collaborative

These four portraits of Langlais attest to Katz’s range of concerns and techniques during the years just after art school. By 1959 he began to produce cutouts, hybrids of painting and sculpture. In fact, the cutout genre arose when a double portrait that Katz was making of Helen and Bernard Langlais “wasn’t working,” and, after some consideration, he removed the canvas figures and mounted them onto wood. Created not long after that, this portrayal of Langlais (nicknamed “Blackie” by friends) complicates the nature of the cutout medium by evoking, in both proportion and solemnity, the classical portrait bust.