Morris Katz

Red Roses, Late 20th Century Impasto Floral Still-Life, Record Breaking Artist

c.1990s

Morris Katz (born Moshe Katz on March 5, 1932 in Galicia, Poland, died November 12, 2010 at age 78 in The Bronx, New York) was a Jewish-American painter. He holds two Guinness World Records as the world's fastest painter and the world's most prolific artist. He has also been called the "King of Schlock Art" and the "King of Toilet Paper Art" because of a novel means of painting he developed using a palette knife and toilet tissue instead of a paintbrush. Katz was born in 1932 in Galicia, Poland. At age 13 he studied under Dr. Hans Fokler of the Munich Academy. After World War II, he lived for a while in a displaced persons camp, where he earned a diploma in carpentry, and he has since said that toilet paper is his "diploma in art." He moved to the United States in 1949, when he took a job in carpentry while maintaining a sideline with his art. While working on his unpublished Dictionary of Color in 1956, he decided to try painting with his palette knife instead of his brushes. After some time he also began experimenting with the use of rags; when he ran out of rags he turned to toilet tissue. As of February 2007, over his career he had painted more than 280,000 paintings. Over his long career, he has established himself as a painter, comedian, and television personality. Katz describes his method as "Instant Art," as he has completed entire paintings in as little as 30 seconds. In a 1987 event to benefit the Boy Scouts of America, Katz completed 103 paintings (selling 55 of them on the spot) in 12 hours. He is listed as a human oddity in Ripley's Believe It Or Not because of his ability to paint full works of art in less than five minutes.