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Franz
Kline (1910-1962)
Franz Kline was born in the dark hills of Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania, where he grew
up marked by the region's black coal mines and railroads.
The future artist was always fascinated by trains; later, at the
height of his career, he titled several of his paintings after trains.
A good student and athlete, he was also the cartoonist for his
high school newspaper; eventually he studied academic drawing and
painting at Boston University and the Art Students League before
traveling to London where he attended Heatherly's Art School.
During the Great Depression of 1929, American artists were given
stipends and kept alive by the Federal Art Project under President
Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration.
This allowed many artists, in their formative years, to
experiment and develop during a time of bread lines, social protests,
and political rallies. Meeting
in dingy lofts and all‑night bars and cafeterias in Greenwich
Village, the more ambitious artists made an environment where they could
emulate the cafe-studio life of Paris as they followed the latest
European art movements in foreign publications.
Reacting against the provincial American art styles at the time,
the New York avant-garde artists were attempting to synthesize and go
beyond the modern movements, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstraction, and
Expressionism, which they knew primarily from black and white
reproductions.
World War II forced many European critics, dealers, and museum
directors, as well as artists, to flee to the United States, which
helped create the ferment that developed into Abstract Expressionism,
the first major original direction in American art.
And the center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York.
In 1938 Franz Kline returned to America from London with a
British wife and settled in
New York City. In the early
1940s he won awards at the National
Academy of Design, and as a Greenwich Village sidewalk artist,
produced traditional city scenes, studies of interiors and
figures. Willem
de Kooning is credited with introducing Kline to abstraction, and
Kline began experimenting with small black and white brush drawings
which he projected onto his studio wall with a Bell-optican, magnifying
the brush strokes into enormous ideograms. These gestural ideograms, like handwriting, the human voice or personality, vibrate differently with each individual artist and reflect different feelings, sensations, and emotions. Kline, perhaps more than any other Abstract Expressionist painter, demonstrated his experience of hand and arm gesture when his forceful line was placed on the canvas. His works suggest rapidly developed and spontaneous compositions almost independent of the space they generate in relation to those pictorial coefficients, black and white. His linear extensions enter and leave the edges of the canvas, continuing into space, beyond the painting. Abstract artists feel instinctively that the order in nature can not be justified by the mere observation of nature. Indeed, the spatial universe is a field of force and of incessant activity; the great powers of nature, such as gravity, the changes in motion and direction, are determined by configurations and movements of masses. Kline's abstractions are about force, about clashing energy, limitless mass, and planeless dimensions. It was the startling vigor of his paintings, with their non-chromatic boldness, that stunned the art world when they saw Kline's first solo exhibition in New York in 1950. At first, viewers saw only a chaotic field of black lines against a white ground; eventually the more discerning realized that the black lines related to the white areas and combined into a single perceptual concept. Accent Grave is one of Kline's most open compositions, with the white shapes deployed by black trajectories of force, dividing the picture in half. Elementary visual logic expects the principle form somewhere in the center, but here the form has the property of simple location in space. The tightly compacted black lines, which carry the eye horizontally out of the picture, encroach on the clear-cut whites above and below. But the white is not subordinate, it does not go behind the black as ground but comes to the edge of the black and forms its own field. Accent Grave is among the very few paintings by Kline which incorporates an arc or part of a circle. The long black incisions stretching horizontally across the surface seem at first to be straight, but, as large arcs, they play an important part in relating to the smaller, bracketing arc on the left. Like a logarithmic curve (any two segments of a curve are the same shape, merely different in size), the large curve at the bottom is countered by the arc above in a mirror image of the first. The small semi-circle at left is almost in a state of rest as it directs our eye compulsively to the narrowing white area to the right. It is a duality of opposites - opposites usually cancel each other out, but here they squeeze the field of force into a compressed activity, and defy gravity. A large black triangular form is suggested within the juncture of large arcs, but we cannot tell whether it is in front, or behind, or part of the overall dark form. However, these ambiguous forms dominate, if very subtly, the shape which is echoed in smaller white triangular forms, becoming progressively smaller and scattered within the central mass. This parenthetical arc outlines a triangular fan shape to its right; all these triangles act as a prelude to the triangular accent floating in the white space above as though flicked on spontaneously and as easily as one adds a diacritical mark to a foreign word. The artist worked back and forth, from black shapes to white shapes, modifying them, shaping them, developing their positions and their relationships to one another. He set up a conflict between black and white which eventually resolved itself into a final unity encompassing the rectangle of the picture, with all shapes equally controlled. He disliked the comparison of his work with calligraphy, which is a matter of writing on a white surface; Kline's own use of black and white was quite different since his intention was to create positive shapes with white as well as with black: "People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it, but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important."
Kline had an acute visual memory; after establishing a composition through sketches or drawings, he would often transpose the composition to a larger painting. The small Black and White of 1954 clearly relates to the larger Accent Grave of the next year. Abstract Expressionism was not generally accepted for a long time, and it was denounced by dealers and critics as well as politicians and the public. One public official harangued modern art as an effort to "addle the brains of innocent Americans" so the Russians could conquer the United States without firing a shot, and that Abstract Expressionism was "shackled to Communism." From its origins in the early 1940s until official recognition with the Museum of Modern Art exhibition, "Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America" of 1951, Abstract Expressionism developed into one of the most powerful and original movements in art. By the end of the 1950s, "The New American Painting", organized by the Museum of Modern Art, was sent to eight European countries where it was admired and recognized as an astonishing break with traditional methods of seeing and making art. Franz Kline was awarded the prize at the XXX Biennale, Venice, in 1960; two years late, in his prime and at the height of his career, he died of heart failure at age 51. Franz
Kline bibliography: This paper was written with the help of a Release-Time Research Grant from Long Island University, the Brooklyn Campus.
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