Alex Katz's Subway Drawings series, emerging from his time as a student in the 1940s, captures the essence of New York's subway passengers with a unique blend of immediacy and introspection. These sketches, often made during Katz's subway rides into the early hours, served as a dynamic classroom where Katz could study figures in a more spontaneous, real-world context compared to the posed models of the art school studio. The drawings are characterized by their sparse line work, capturing fleeting moments and the solitude of passengers lost in contemplation, surrounded by the empty space of the subway car. This approach reflects Katz's early exploration of capturing "the present tense" through art, a theme that has persisted throughout his career.

The collection of these early works, as detailed in a publication by Timothy Taylor, highlights Katz's evolving skill as a draftsman and his search for a distinctive visual language that prefigured the stylistic developments in his later, more renowned paintings. Katz's subway drawings are not just studies of form and character but also convey the isolation and transient nature of urban life, with figures rendered in moments of quiet detachment, disconnected from their shared environment yet bound by it.

These drawings were brought together for an exhibition titled "Alex Katz: Subway Drawings" at Timothy Taylor 16x34, showcasing over 50 of these works for the first time. The exhibition not only offered insights into Katz's formative years but also underscored the lasting influence of these early experiments on his subsequent artistic output. The drawings, with their unfinished, almost surreal quality, capture the essence of city life's anonymity and transience, making them a significant, though perhaps less familiar, facet of Katz's body of work​ (The Forward)​​ (Timothy Taylor)​.