Robert Storr interviews painter Alex Katz.

Katz remarks: “I want to paint what I see; I don’t want to paint what someone else painted. I live in New York and I go up to Maine, and that’s what I paint. I don’t want to paint other people’s pictures in my studio. That makes it American, don’t you think? When you’re working with the tradition of art, you’re usually painting like the paintings you’ve seen; your vision is other people’s vision. You see things through the culture in which you live, and the culture in which you live is always past tense. Some people are always seeing things in another time period. To see things in the present time period, you have to break through, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do.”