Philip Pearlstein’s portrait of Alex Katz is the first gift from Katz to enter the Met’s collection. Both Katz and Pearlstein remained committed to figurative painting during the 1950s and 1960s, decades otherwise dominated by abstraction. Despite this affinity, however, their approaches to representing the figure are quite different. Pearlstein’s painting of Katz exemplifies a degree of realism absent in Katz’s portrait of Pearlstein (1979.213.1). [https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/481772]