Since the beginning of October of last year, a small, sharply focused installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has celebrated the work of Alex Katz.1 It will continue to do so through June 26. Seven paintings from the Met’s collection, recent gifts, or promised gifts, document the artist’s mature career from its start to the present—the most economical retrospective imaginable. (The museum owns several other paintings and some prints by Katz, not included in this installation, although on my last visit, one of them, a generous 1976 head of the artist’s wife, Ada, was installed in a nearby gallery.) The earliest work in the current installation, Ada, the artist’s first portrait of his muse and most constant model, was painted in 1957, the year when the couple met, when Katz, born in 1927, turned thirty, and when he had his second solo show in New York. Modest in size, loosely painted, and firmly constructed, Ada at once bears witness to the climate in which it was painted—when gestural abstraction still exerted a powerful influence on aspiring artists—while its forthright image challenges that inheritance. The most recent painting in the group, Nicole, a large, horizontal canvas of a watchful blonde in a red coat, dates from 2014. The decades between Ada and Nicole are accounted for by John’s Loft (1969), a composite of cut-out figures and figure fragments, at various scales, spread across the wall; Philip Pearlstein(1978), a two-sided cut-out on aluminum; an over-scaled,