Franz Kline

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Franz Kline (May 23, 1910 – May 13, 1962) was an American painter.

He is identified with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s.

The New York School was founded by Kline, as well as other action painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, John Ferren, and Lee Krasner, as well as local poets, dancers, and musicians.

Though he studied the same techniques to painting as the other members of the group, Kline's work is unique in itself and has been revered since the 1950s.

Early work

Kline's artistic training primarily concentrated on traditional illustration and drafting. In comparison to commission portraits and murals, Kline worked figuratively, painting landscapes and cityscapes in the late 1930s and early 1940s. His unique style can be seen in the mural series Hot Jazz, which he created for the Bleecker Street Tavern in Greenwich Village in 1940.

The series revealed his obsession with transforming real body parts into quick, rudimentary brushstrokes.

He began to express himself in a more abstract way during this period. Several of the figures depicted are based on the locomotives, stark landscapes, and massive mechanical figures of his native, coal-mining community in Pennsylvania. The pieces are often only apparent to viewers because they are named after those places and objects, not because they look like the subject. Kline went further into abstraction and then rejected representationalism, as a result of the influence of the contemporary New York art scene. Kline began generalizing his figures into lines and planes that fit together much like Cubism's of the time.

The Lehighton, Pennsylvania Post of the American Legion, 1946, hired Kline to produce a large canvas depicting the town where he had attended high school. The mural Lehighton was purchased by the Allentown Art Museum in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and is on display today.

According to several, Kline's most recognisable style resulted from a compliment made to him by his buddy and creative influence, Willem de Kooning. Elaine de Kooning's wife Elaine gave a romanticized version of the incident, saying that de Kooning advised an artistically ill Kline to draw a sketch onto the wall of his studio in 1948 using a Bell-Opticon projector.

Kline described the projection as such:

"A four-by-five inch black drawing of a rocking chair [...] loomed in massive black strokes that destroyed any image, and the strokes have grown as entities separate from any entity but in the presence of their own."

It was then that Kline devoted himself to large-scale abstract art and began to produce his own brand of Abstract Expressionism, as Elaine de Kooning says. However, even though Willem de Kooning recalls that Kline "delved into abstraction "all of a sudden," he admits that it took him a long time," he continues to say that "Franz had a dream, but it takes a long time to work it out." Kline's bushstrokes became completely non-representative, elastic, and dynamic over the next two years. Also at this time, Kline began painting only in black and white. "I paint the white as well as the black, and the black is just as important," he explained how his monochrome palette was supposed to depict negative and positive space. His use of black and white is very similar to paintings created by de Kooning and Pollock in the 1940s. Through his friendship with the Japanese avant-garde calligraphy company Bokujinkai and its chief Morita Shiryu, Kline's black and white paintings also appear to have references to Japanese calligraphy, although Kline later denied that connection.

On October 16, 1950, the first one-man exhibition in Kline took place at 63 East 57th Street, the first one-man exhibition. Eleven abstract paintings were on display. In Leda, color was a special feature in the paintings: brown underpainting along the bottom of Nijinsky and fleeting hints of green. The paintings displayed a variety of styles and moods, but they all had one defining feature: Kline's signature style of black on white. Kline had described himself as a "black and white guy" three years ago in London, but not until this show, did the accuracy of this period become apparent to others. Kline was dubbed the "black and white artist" by Kline's fame and concrete style, a brand that remained with the artist and who would occasionally be bound by. Kline's first one-man exhibition was a pivotal event in his career, marking the transition from start to end of Kline's major contribution as an abstract artist. Kline had a personal style at forty years old that he had already mastered. There were no legitimate ways for Kline to further his probe; he only had the ability to imitate the style he had already mastered. For Kline's continued development, there was only one logical course to go: back to color, the direction he was headed at the time of his premature death from heart disease.

Kline began working with more complex chiaroscuro in the late 1950s, rather than concentrating on a narrow monochromatic palette. Through vivid accents in his black and white paintings, the artist reintroduced color in his art in 1958. When Kline died in 1962, this return to color-use was still in existence.

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