Word: klines
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...epic of American self-esteem, and so on, and so forth. So much money and institutional clout have been poured into and around the pyramid that it now seems as fixed a historical construct as that of Cheops. Nevertheless, it has not commemorated all the artists equally. Kline is the proof...
...could certainly argue, on the evidence of this show, that Kline possessed neither the innovative powers of Jackson Pollock, nor the ramping, risky intensity of Willem de Kooning, nor the reflective pictorial intelligence that distinguishes the best work of Mark Rothko or Robert Motherwell. But he was still, when on form, a first-rate painter, well worth scholarly attention. So why have we seen so little of him? Because, it seems, the common curatorial view is that Kline was a backup man, not an innovator. This has chilled the interest of museums, if not the market. So, until a fuller...
...Kline's misfortune to die before he had worked out the big change of his mature style, from black and white to color. At the same time, there was never much interest in his early efforts. The paintings of industrial landscapes from his youth, city streets, bar scenes and alienated clowns (Nijinsky as Petrouchka, done from an old photograph, was a favorite image) were seen, if at all, as a mere prelude to his abstract work. They did not look as "interesting" as the early work of his colleagues because Kline was the only abstract expressionist not touched by surrealism...
...enraged Kline to hear, as he often did, that these works imitated Oriental calligraphy. The calligrapher's white paper is always neutral, a void, whereas Kline wanted his whites to be seen for what they were--blocks and patches of pigment, as painted as the blacks. Moreover, he disliked the word's pseudospiritual aura. Those black strokes were the residue of a tough, specific place, one to which David Smith's sculpture also appealed: a world of trestles and girders, piers and railbeds and X braces, of sooty industrial silhouettes and locomotives highballing through the lonesome American dark...
This retrospective shows, clearly enough, how such images wound into Kline's work from his roots in the coal country of eastern Pennsylvania, where he was raised by his stepfather, a foreman on the Lehigh Valley Railroad, after his father shot himself in 1917. There is a direct link between his early industrial landscapes of the '40s and a painting like Wotan, 1950, through the work of Kline's contemporaries--especially, in the '40s, De Kooning, whose influence on Kline was pervasive. A case can be made for Wotan as Kline's masterpiece; that extraordinarily forthright black rectangle, with...