A large, powerful and almost visually explosive work with its vast, sweeping, brushstroke forms colliding into one another to create a taut and febrile tension of surface, it is a classic example of the tradition established by these works.
#Franz kline black subjectivity series#
Painted in 1957, this nearly ten-foot wide untitled work is one of the finest of the great series of predominantly black-and-white abstractions that Kline produced between 1950 and his premature death in 1962. 'Action Painting,' its leading champion and originator of the term, Harold Rosenberg exclaimed, is nothing less than "the abstraction of the moral element in art: its mark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties: and it judges itself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporation of a genuine struggle, one which could at any point have been lost" (H. Kline's balletic 'push and thrust' of contrasting black and white paint was seen to be expressive of a fundamentally human act of self-assertion made in the face of the void. A gestural abstraction such as that developed by Kline at this time, with its seemingly spontaneously created formal expression of physical energy fixed into the material of paint, was regarded, like Nietzsche's exemplar of the tightrope walker in Also Sprach Zarathustra, as a metaphor for man's life and death balancing act over an abyss. It was for this reason, their compete and daring lack of moderation, compromise or restraint, and also because they appear to be as expressive of the vigorous and existential act of painting or making art - of the human energy and drama that went into the picture's making - that Kline's black-and-white paintings were also championed as the ultimate examples of 'Action Painting.' They are works, like Pollock's drip-pictures or de Kooning's abstractions, in which the heroic lone painterly struggle of the artist to arrive at a successfully resolved formal conclusion was deemed as important, if not more so, than the resultant object itself.
cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1994, p. Brach, quoted in Franz Kline Art and the Structure of Identity, exh. There is no moderation, no middle ground, no compromise" (P. As the painter Paul Brach declared of Kline's paintings at this time, they are "statements of an acute crisis. More than any other pictures from this extraordinarily vital and creative period in history, it is these works that best express the New York School painters' distinctly urban and romantic sense of themselves as lone individuals caught in an existential struggle with modern life of their being the heroic pioneers in a modern cultural wasteland operating on behalf of an endangered humanity with the hope of forging a new art from the cultural void left by World War II, the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb. Stark, raw, blunt and direct, these works, often heroically scaled, are pure, elemental abstractions that dynamically express the artist's complete physical and emotional involvement in his work using only the most fundamental of painterly means.
Seeming to encapsulate all the energy, drama, freedom and dynamism embodied by this seminal decade in the history of American 20th Century Art and to condense it into one extraordinary flat planar space, Kline's black-and white paintings are the quintessential 'Abstract Expressionist' pictures. There are perhaps no finer pictorial expressions of the unique, exhilarating and dramatic period of liberation and triumph that took place in American painting in New York in the 1950s than the large, dynamic, freeform black-and-white paintings that Franz Kline produced between 19. His big paintings can be as good as his small ones, a rare mastery in this period concerned with the power of magnitude" (Robert Motherwell, 'Homage to Franz Kline' August 17, 1962, quoted in Franz Kline: The Color Abstractions exh. And his sense of scale, that sine qua non of good painting, is marvelously precise. "Who could not be moved by his sense of push and thrust? Kline's great black bars have the tension of a taut bow, or a ready catapult. Hess (Thomas B Hess, ArtNews Vol 61, New York, Summer 1962, reproduced in Franz Kline 1910-62 exh., cat.
It was as if a whole slice of our culture, overnight, had come to life - with Franz Kline at our shoulder to point where to look"-Thomas B. After 1950, we started to see city buildings, bridge spans, car tracks, asphalt spilling in cement, Velasquez, painted-out wall slogans, Rembrandt, Punch illustrators, the signature of John Hancock, Romney's drawings, Goya, Delacroix lions, a landscape by Courbet, or a landscape in Easthampton or Provincetown with fresh immediacy.
His style has that quality which rips the filters of Style from our eye. "Franz Kline's white and black pictures performed that miracle which is a constant in all major art: he changed the look of the environment and history.
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