Description

Until the early 1940s, Franz Kline painted realistic landscapes, portraits, and cityscapes that were inspired by the textures and forms of New York City. Around 1949 he began to make black-and-white canvases such as Painting, which, while abstract, continue to suggest the invigorating energy of urban street life. The artist’s preparation for his paintings included making numerous sketches on newspaper or telephone-book pages. He then translated a small-scale drawing onto canvas, as, what he called, “strokes expanding as entities in themselves.” Utilizing housepainters’ brushes, Kline tacked his canvases to a wood panel in order to obtain the hard surface that he needed to paint his world of eternally colliding forces. Though the many visible drip marks imply a quick, spontaneous execution, the artist returned to this work several times over a two-month period to refine and strengthen its rhythm and spacing.

Provenance

The artist, New York; his estate, 1962; sold to Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, 1969 [this and the following according to Franz Kline Paintings, 1950–1962, Digital Catalogue Raisonné, published by Hauser & Wirth Institute]; sold to Herman Cooper, Poole, United Kingdom, Nov. 5, 1969; sold to Sigmund E. Edelstone, by 1972; bequeathed to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1984.

Painting

Franz Kline

1952

Accession Number

102581

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

195.6 × 254 cm (77 × 100 in.)

Classification

oil on canvas

Museum

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, United States

Credit Line

Bequest of Sigmund E. Edelstone

Background & Context

Background Story

Franz Klines Painting from 1952 is a large-scale abstract canvas from the period when the artist was consolidating the black and white vocabulary that would make him one of the most recognizable figures of Abstract Expressionism. The painting presents bold black strokes that slash across a white field with the urgency and physical force that distinguish Klines best work from mere calligraphic exercise. The year 1952 marks the moment when Klines signature style crystallized: the massive black forms that had first appeared in his work around 1950 achieved their full monumentality, and the white ground ceased to be mere background and became an active compositional element equal in weight to the black forms. Painting is characteristic of this period in its refusal of a single center of interest: the black strokes are distributed across the canvas in a rhythm that suggests both architectural structure and gestural improvisation, as if a building and a gesture had been compressed into the same visual field. The oil paint is applied with a speed and directness that belie the careful planning that Klines preliminary drawings reveal, the result of a working process in which small brush drawings on telephone book pages were projected onto large canvases and then reinterpreted in paint at full scale. The canvas itself, with its exposed white areas and thick impasto blacks, becomes a record of the physical encounter between the artist and the painting.

Cultural Impact

Klines black and white paintings of 1950-52 are among the most iconic works of Abstract Expressionism, and their influence on subsequent abstract painting, design, and visual culture has been pervasive. Painting demonstrates the monumentality and physical force that made Klines work a touchstone for artists seeking to combine gestural freedom with architectural structure.

Why It Matters

A quintessential 1952 black and white abstract canvas by Kline in which bold black strokes slash across a white field with architectural urgency, demonstrating the balanced distribution of forms and physical directness that defined his signature contribution to Abstract Expressionism.

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