Instead, he emphasized the non-symbolic character of the work, and what he called "painting experience." He was supported in this by critics such as Clement Greenberg, who focused on the importance of abstract form in art, and sidelined discussions of sources or content. When asked to explain the meaning of his work, he refused, saying that he wanted the viewers to feel the effects of the composition unhindered by suggestion. However, the artist denied it, claiming that his inspirations came from unconscious sources. The suggestion first surfaced in reviews of his breakthrough show of 1950. "A four by five inch black drawing of a rocking chair," Kline recalled, ".loomed in gigantic black strokes which eradicated any image, the strokes expanding as entities in themselves, unrelated to any entity but that of their own existence." The pictures, which resulted from this revelation, were first exhibited at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1950, a show that established Kline's reputation.Ĭritics have long debated whether Kline's black and white paintings were inspired by Japanese calligraphy. In part he was inspired by de Kooning's black and white paintings of 1946-49, and - although the story is apocryphal - it is said that de Kooning also inspired him to scale up the work, after he encouraged him to examine it using an enlarger. He had already began to explore an austere black and white palette in a series of ink on paper sketches, but now he brought the technique to canvases and employed house-painting brushes to create broad strokes of black criss-crossing white canvases. Around 1947, under the influence of de Kooning, he also began to abandon figuration and experiment on a large scale with a gestural, abstract technique. At this point, his work was shaped by his love of Old Masters such as Rembrandt, but in 1943 he met Willem de Kooning and began to frequent the Cedar Bar, where he met Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston. He was forced to take odd jobs: he painted murals in bars and sold illustrations to magazines. The first few years back in New York proved difficult for Kline. Kline's reluctance to attribute hidden meanings to his pictures was important in recommending his work to a later generation of Minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd and Richard Serra.Along with De Kooning and Pollock, Kline was one of the examplary artists heralded in Harold Rosenberg's definition of Action Painting. The powerful forms of his motifs, and their impression of velocity, were intended to translate into an experience of structure and presence which the viewer could almost palpably feel.Yet Kline saw his method less as a means to express himself than as a way to create a physical engagement with the viewer. The poet and curator Frank O'Hara saw Kline as the quintessential 'action painter', and Kline's black and white paintings certainly helped establish gestural abstraction as an important tendency within Abstract Expressionism.Franz Kline is most famous for his black and white abstractions, which have been likened variously to New York's cityscape, the landscape of his childhood home in rural Pennsylvania, and Japanese calligraphy.It doesn’t bother me whether it does or not. The whites, of course, turned yellow, and many people call your attention to that, you know they want white to stay white for ever. As a matter of fact, I just used any black that I could get ahold of.ĭAVID SYLVESTER: And the whites the same say?įRANZ KLINE: The whites the same way. No, I didn’t have any idea of mixing up different kids of blacks. Sometimes a black, because of the quantity of it or the mass or the volume, looks at though it may be a blue-black, as if there were blue mixed in with the black, or as though it were a brown-black or a red-black. I didn’t have particularly a strong desire to use colour, say, in the lights or darks of a black-and-white painting, althought what happened is that accidentally they look that way. I mean there was that marvellous twenty-minute experience of thinking, well, all my life has been wasted but this is marvellous – that sort of thing.ĭAVID SYLVESTER: During the time that you were producing only black-and-white paintings, where you ever colour and then painting over it with black?įRANZ KLINE: No, they started off that way. And then, when they got that way, I just liked them, you know. I think there was a time when the original forms that finally came out in black and white were in colour and then as time went on I painted them out and make them black and white. It was edited for broadcasting by the BBC and first published in “Living Arts” in the spring of 1963:įRANZ KLINE: It wasn’t a question of deciding to do black-and-white painting. An excerpt from the interview with British critic David Sylvester recorded March 1960 in New York City.
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