Paint it good, paint it fast and sell it cheap.
Sometimes an artist’s life can change the way you see their art. Picasso, Kahlo, Warhol, for example, all led incredibly bohemian lives which have been reflected in their canvases as their enchanting personalities continue to bring buyers to auctions.
Morris Katz may not be as recognizable, but his unique passion and personality was lived both on and off the canvas.
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He was born March 5, 1932 in Poland and was a Holocaust survivor, but lost most of his family in concentration camps. He moved to the United States in 1949 as a refugee, following World War II, where he took a job in carpentry. He started painting as a hobby but after experimenting with pallet knives and rags in 1956 he gave up using paintbrushes. Katz’s technique involved painting using only a palette knife and wads of paper tissue to create shadings and shapes.
The self-proclaimed "king of instant painting," Katz holds the world record for completing a painting in the shortest amount of time. On May 9, 1988, he painted a 12 by 16 inch canvas of a child in the snow in 30 seconds and then, took just 8 seconds to frame it. In 1987, during a 12-hour stint at the Penta Hotel (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) in Manhattan, Katz cranked out 103 paintings and sold 55 of them in a fundraiser for the Boy Scouts of America.
Despite these speeds, Katz still managed to create portraits with character and landscapes with depth. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, he started his Presidential Collection project, creating portraits of each president from George Washington to George H. W. Bush. In 1965, he was chosen by the Vatican to paint a portrait of Pope Paul VI, 3 million copies of which were sold.
He became something of a minor a celebrity, even appearing on the David Letterman Show and Oprah. More than 100 museums around the world have exhibited and own his work, including The Smithsonian.
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He also holds a second world record with the Guinness Book of Records for being the world's most prolific artist. He painted over 280,000 artworks and sold more that 225,000 pieces of art in his career, breaking Picasso's record in 1985.
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Katz died in 2010, but his legacy lives on in his world records and of course his artwork, as his paintings are still on the market for thousands of dollars.
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This is an updated version of the article originally published on May 31, 2016.