Coming of age as an artist in the 1950s, Alex Katz set out to reinvent representational painting by applying lessons learned from postwar abstraction. Initially, he struggled to find an audience, destroying hundreds of canvases. This book is the first survey of the artwork from this momentous decade, one in which Katz began to paint outdoors, innovated with collages, invented the cutout, and met Ada del Moro, his wife and muse. The authors consider how he and his peers borrowed from one another, leaning on photography and mining both nineteenth-century portraiture and other creative arts, and examine his conceptual investment in serial imagery. The result is a fascinating study of a young artist laying the groundwork for an astonishingly successful career, and a fresh look at the aesthetic exchanges among painters in and around the New York School.