ARTIST OVERVIEW

Franz Kline (1910-1962) was a dominant figure within New York's action painting school of abstract expressionism, and he distilled the notion of a gestural art to its purest form. For Kline, painting was an existential act, a confrontation with the material realities of pigment and canvas. “I don't decide that I'm going to paint a definite experience,” he stated, “but in the act of painting, it becomes a genuine experience for me.”

Kline started painting monochromatically in the mid-1940s. He had moved to New York in 1939, after a brief period of post-graduate study in London where he painted in a representational manner. During the war he befriended Willem de Kooning, and later became an active member of the group of abstract painters who frequented the Cedar bar in New York's Greenwich Village. It was during this time that he started making black and white calligraphic abstractions using enamel paint. In the late forties, de Kooning enlarged some of Kline's brush drawings using a projector. This discovery led to Kline's working in a large format.

By restricting himself to a palette of black and white, Kline laid bare the formal elements of brushwork, composition, and gesture, which describe nothing other than their own existence and the artist's engagement with the confined world of the picture plane. His paintings from this period often employ a crude grid intersected with calligraphic loops and curves and feature austere tonal contrasts. By 1950, his black and white enamel paintings had achieved significant critical attention.

After a decade of exploring the limits of black and white, Kline reintroduced color into his palette in the mid-fifties, working with strong greens, reds, and purples (although some of the black-and-white works do feature limited color). In the decade before his death, he was included in major international exhibitions, including the 1956 and 1960 Venice Biennales and the 1957 São Paulo Bienal, and he won a number of important prizes. Kline died at age 51 in New York in 1962.