Word: klines
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...Kline died in 1961 at the early age of 51, and since then he has not turned out to be a darling of the museums and the art historians. The last full museum show of his work was back in 1985, and in Cincinnati, Ohio; it never came to New York City. So the present show at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, "Franz Kline: Black & White, 1950-1961," breaks an unwelcome silence on a strong, if admittedly somewhat limited, artist. It is really the black-and-white works that bear Kline's claim to importance...
...early figurative work is not in the show, but it is worth remembering for its origins. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Kline had an entirely traditional training at the Art Students League in Boston, wanted to be an illustrator and studied for a time (1936-38) in London. He was imbued with the thick-massed but linear realism that came out of the Ashcan School and filled the cartoons that John Sloan and others did for periodicals like the New Masses. He doted on Krazy Kat (as did his friend Philip Guston) and the superstylish illustrations of John Held...
People who knew him in the '40s and '50s remember that Kline liked to talk about Gericault and Velazquez, about old silver and 18th century political cartoons, rather than the gaseous rodomontade of "tragic chaos" and "existential risk" that got loaded onto Abstract Expressionism by such artists as Barnett Newman and such critics as Harold Rosenberg. In short, he was very interested in style, a suspect idea then but one that his paintings are none the worse for raising. We can't see Kline the way the art world did 40 years ago, when critics wrote about his "desperate shriek...
...black-and-white style was a real invention, but its roots are not hard to see. If one was illustration, another was the black-and-white paintings of de Kooning in the late '40s. An early Kline like Ninth Street, 1951, with its traces of looping body shapes, makes that clear. Where it did not come from, though, was where it was often said to have come from: Oriental calligraphy. Of course, there is a superficial likeness between Kline's structures and ideograms in sumi ink on silk, especially in reproduction, when the particular qualities of paint and surface...
...through this show one catches such premonitory notes, and one realizes what a big submerged effect Kline must have had on some of the better artists now alive: Richard Serra, for instance, whose dark walls of steel and thickly scrubbed-on black-crayon drawings evoke the same urban-industrial landscape that inspired Kline, or Brice Marden, or Cy Twombly, who lent this show a bunch of Kline's quickly brushed, frail sketches done on now crumbling pages of Manhattan telephone directories. These studies, not incidentally, dispose of the myth that Kline was a wholly spontaneous painter who staked everything...