![]() ![]() It doesn’t matter that Kline may well have turned the painting around a few times (most of the drips run upward). 2, 1954, nearly nine feet wide-appear effortless and even spontaneous. Some of his abstractions are taut (success), whereas others are stiff (failure).Ĭertain paintings, regardless of size and no matter how worked over-such as Painting No. Yet the Kline of this exhibition-judged by the artist’s own standards-both succeeded and failed. But what’s a viewer to do? How do these paintings from the ’50s actually affect viewers today? Interested parties are likely to know the pictures that came before the black and white abstractions as well as the problematic Klines of color that would join them later, especially after 1958. The catalogue essay rightly warns its readers to be wary of myth. As a result (so this entirely plausible story goes), Kline began again as a painter, began to live in the present he crafted, a present he would maintain (if I may elaborate on the standard mythology) by holding himself on the razor’s edge between success and failure. The experience inspired him to imitate what he saw, that is, to imitate himself. Many of us already know the story of Kline’s “breakthrough” from tiny to grand, safe to risky, studied to exuberant, modest to ambitious (or perhaps bombastic): around 1949, at the suggestion of his friend Willem de Kooning, he projected some of his drawings on a studio wall. Before 1950 (as well as after) Kline made numerous striking but tiny drawings the larger dimension might be no more than five or six inches, a format strained by the breadth of his mark. These are the subject of “Franz Kline: Black & White, 1950–1962,” organized by the Menil Collection, Houston, guest-curated by David Whitney, and with a catalogue essay by David Anfam. In a sense, Kline did not escape until 1950, when he inaugurated his signature series of large abstract paintings in black and white. Painting, the more challenging the better, becomes escape not only for the viewer but for the artist. Perhaps he was compelled to make art hard for himself in order to create a working environment absorbing enough to offset his enduring and unfathomable human loss. It must be significant that Kline was a child survivor of a father’s suicide. The painter himself couldn’t be satisfied with an analogous ease in art, one of his many “natural” talents. ![]() He was Kline the “affable” (I quote the first adjective used to describe him in a 1952 Artnews feature). Everyone liked Kline: he had great looks, an engaging manner, effortless charm and wit. He desired the kind of difficulty he didn’t experience in the world outside the studio, where things generally came easy to him. Like many other statements of the period, Kline’s remark was probably coaxed forth by the interviewer (in this case, Frank O’Hara) and may even be an invention. In this case, the central black shape is a mirror image of the shape in a black and white untitled painting of 1954.“You instinctively like what you can’t do,” Franz Kline said in a 1958 interview, referring to the precise yet ethereal style of Fra Angelico. He often drew inspiration for large compositions from small studies, and he also continued explorations of key elements in works even years after their creation. The sweeps and rapid brushings of both thick and diluted paint are the product of much meditation. Kline’s work, so apparently spontaneous or impulsive in its emphasis on highly dramatic gestural brushstrokes, is, in fact, carefully considered. Black Reflections, an intensely colored small work on paper, may in fact relate to an earlier black and white piece. I don’t have the feeling that something has to be completely non-associative as far as figure form is concerned.” Kline acknowledged this residue of imagery: “There are forms that are figurative to me, and if they develop into a figurative image … it’s all right if they do. For many, even these works of complete abstraction still evoke figural references (to various landscapes or urban scenes of industry, or to trees or other referents). Large-scale black and white compositions of energetic, dramatic gestures in which wide swaths of paint thrust across the canvas. By late 1950, he was exhibiting abstract work that immediately brought him success. As a means to break free of figurative representation, Kline experimented with a Bell-Opticon enlarger (in de Kooning’s studio) to project some of his small drawings in large scale, and he made a leap toward abstraction. By that time, he was ready to concentrate on formal concerns, and his friendship with Willem de Kooning helped pave the way. Kline arrived at Abstract Expressionism later than others, having continued working in a figural style redolent of American Scene painters into the late 1940s. Mixed media: Oil and pasted paper on paper, mounted on masonite, 48.3 x 49.2 cm. ![]()
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