Biographical Information:
Franz Kline was born in the coal mining district of Eastern Pennsylvania in 1910, studied art in Boston and London and, throughout the 1940s, painted figures and urban scenes reminiscent of Social Realism.
His abstract style developed after World War II, at which time Kline, with Motherwell, Pollock, and other New York avant-gardists, held open discussions in Greenwich Village. When he made his first large-scale black-and-white abstractions, Kline was well aware of the experiments of the pioneer Abstract Expressionists, although he never shared Pollock's interest in myth or Rothko's interest in the sublime, and used less spontaneous gesture than his friend de Kooning. Instead he worked out his compositions in advance, with preliminary sketches, usually on pages from telephone books.
Kline's action style, strongly personal and influential, is typified in such canvases as "New York" (1953) and "Sigfried" (1958). He formed powerful, skidding strokes of black in irregular grid patterns on white grounds, sometimes with half-suppressed edges of color appearing alongside the black forms. Kline used house-painter brushes on unstretched canvases tacked to his studio wall, he shaped rugged but controlled brushstrokes into powerful, architectural structures that have affinities with motifs in an industrial landscape. Kline reintroduced color to his compositions in the late 1950s but died in the midst of these new experiments. His painted structures had an enormous impact on younger artists.
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