Alex Katz’s career retrospective, Gathering, opens today at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

I’ve been painting for 77 years. I don’t think hardly any painter ever gets that opportunity. — Alex Katz quoted in The New York Times

Thirty-six years after the last major American survey of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the exhibition includes works from each of the artist’s main series of works, from portraits to water and flower paintings, to his flat cutout sculptures. Beginning with a 1946 portrait of his mother Ella Marion in a red sweater and ending with a recent painting of his wife and lifelong muse, Ada, Gathering spans the entirety of Katz’s nearly eight-decade-long career.