Andy Warhol had his “famous for 15 minutes” theory. Alex Katz, more generously, talks about an artist’s “three-year bounce.”

Mr. Katz has no doubt when his own three years happened – in the early 1960s. He’s not suggesting that the quality of his work reached new heights then, or fell off thereafter. Rather, he simply enjoyed a moment when his internal development suddenly synchronized with the collective needs and expectations of the art world.

Mr. Katz’s three-year bounce is being celebrated in a museum-quality exhibition of his works from the 1960s at PaceWildenstein’s newest space, the old Dia annex on 22nd Street. The show includes museum loans from the Museum of Modern Art, the Weatherspoon in North Carolina, Colby College in Maine, and Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum.

Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Mr. Katz was producing highly individual, mature works by the mid-1950s, but he was a relatively marginal figure amid the triumphs of Abstract Expressionism and its offshoots. His first successful idiom was the small collage in cut paper. The seeming daintiness of these works, often no more than 4 inches by 6 inches,was deceptive: He was teaching himself invaluable lessons about scale. In their delicate, “feminine” colors and diminutive size, they were also a deliberate riposte to the machismo of New York School abstraction. As Mr. Katz later told Richard Prince, “I wanted to kick the machos on their asses.”

Mr. Katz abandoned collage in 1960 to pursue big portraits, but the collage experience was clearly crucial to his discovery of the autonomous figure against a belligerently monochrome ground. “Rockaway” (1961) places three figures – a redhead in a floral dress and two servicemen – against a neutral ground that’s almost graphite gray, delivered in an agitated, animated hand that follows to some extent the contours of the bodies.

But scale was the key issue in Mr. Katz’s breakthrough. The monumentally scaled landscapes, portraits, and group portraits at PaceWildenstein show off the traits that have become Katz trademarks. Glamorous in initial impact, coolly impersonal in touch, his paintings are an exhilarating mix of the ingeniously streamlined and the intriguingly nuanced.

“Lita” (1964), the MoMA loan, is true to form. At roughly 5 feet square, the portrait features a stylish woman with a big blond bob and a high forehead. A four-layered pearl necklace offsets her pale skin, and a low-cut cocktail dress follows a serpentine trail around her bosom to echo the flow of the hair. Volumetric areas of her face are blocked out almost schematically, like the contours on a weather map, in a way that perversely flattens the features at the very moment it defines the planes. This weird mix of flatness and convincing presence is what gave Mr. Katz’s 1960s portraits their singularity.

At the time, such works inevitably read as a bravura collision of seemingly incompatible streams in American art: color field abstraction, with its flatness and monochrome, and realism, with its insistence on the socialized, human subject. Mr. Katz also prefigured Pop art in his acute observation of current fashions, and his billboard-like presentation.

The artist soon realized, however, that his new format could degenerate into mannerism. As he told the painter David Salle in an interview, quoted in the book by Barry Schwabsky that accompanies this exhibition: “When I got to the flat background, that was the most exciting thing in my life – it was a bingo! It was the first time the paintings had real energy to them. But I realized very quickly that if I kept using flat backgrounds I would be in a box.”

His solutions were twofold, and each as radical in its way as the initial breakthrough. One was to reintegrate his figures with environments, and yet retain the shocking sense of displacement. “Ives Field II” (1964) pushes a tension of naturalism and artifice to an extreme. The finely chiseled features of the sitters, who include fellow artists Yvonne Jacquette and Red Grooms, dominate the field of vision almost like Mount Rushmore presidents. Yet the vista glimpsed around them, with ballplayers in the middle ground and hills on the distant horizon, is credible and vast.

Another solution to freeing the figure from the artifice of its ground came in the form of cutout. Mr. Katz discovered this idiom by accident, when he wanted to keep a successful figure in an otherwise failed canvas. He found that it worked better pasted to a wooden support cut to the same shape. Real physical space came to replace the monochrome painted ground as the ideal neutrality in which to isolate the figure.

His cutout masterpiece, “One Flight Up” (1968), shows a party in full swing, with a cast of around three-dozen people, the artist’s social set, in various modes: drinking, chatting, listening, striking a pose. Having originally mounted the cutout busts on a ping pong table, Mr. Katz more recently reset them on prods affixed to a chesthigh aluminum table.

“One Flight Up” plays innumerable painterly and sculptural games. It can be enjoyed in the round, yet it is insistently flat – the optimum views are straight on. Meanwhile, discrepancies of scale emphasize a sense of a dense throng, even though the table is actually less than 4 feet deep. Most panels show a single figure, painted front and back, but a few couples cohabit a single shape.

Within the compressed time span of this exhibition, there’s a giddying array of painterly approaches. For all that Mr. Katz was seeking to distance himself from the AbEx supremacy, his earlier works feature an expressively gestural, distinctly 1950s feel. The thinned-out brushiness of the pair of double portraits “Don and Marisol I and II” (1960) recalls Milton Avery, an early influence. By the time of “Lita,” there is the insistently flat, deadpan paint handling of the 1960s. And the latest painting in the show, “Swamp Maple 4:30” (1968), has a proto-’70s finesse, especially in the exactitude of each leaf and the detailed lawn.

This sense of different surface treatments makes one appreciate the liveliness and progress of Mr. Katz’s subsequent career. These works look as good as anything anyone made in the 1960s, but they don’t look as good as the Alex Katzes painted today.

Until June 17 (545 W. 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-989-4258). Prices: $275,000 and up.