Franz Kline was an American painter, who represented Abstract Expressionism movement. Employing black brushstrokes on white canvases, he created calculated compositions, which were distinct from other artists' works of his generation. Kline was also known for avoiding giving meaning to his paintings, unlike his colleagues, who would give mystical descriptions to their works.
Background
Franz Kline was born on May 23, 1910 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, United States. He was a son of Anthony Kline and Anne (Rowe) Kline. Franz's father, who was a saloon keeper, committed suicide in 1917, when Kline was only seven years old. His mother later remarried and sent Franz to Philadelphia to study there.
Education
Initially, Franz studied at Lehighton High School (present-day Lehighton Area High School) in Pennsylvania. Some time later, his mother sent him to study at Girard College.
In 1931, Kline entered Boston University, where he remained until 1935. There, at the university, his mentors included Frank Durkee, John Grosman and Henry Hensche. Boston offered Franz a wealth of opportunities: not only did his instructors help familiarize him with modern art, but he also learnt much from the city's private and public collections. After leaving the university, Franz studied briefly at the Art Students League of New York.
During the period from 1937 till 1938, Kline studied at Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. It was at that time, that the painter met his future wife, Elizabeth Vincent Parsons, a British ballet dancer.
In 1938, Franz came back to the United States and settled down in New York City. The first few years proved difficult for him and the painter had to take odd jobs — he painted murals in bars and sold illustrations to magazines. In 1943, he got acquainted with Willem de Kooning and began to frequent the Cedar Bar, where he met Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston.
Influenced by Willem de Kooning, Franz turned towards abstraction in his work at the end of the 1940's. At that time, he started to paint his small black-and-white brush drawings. At the end of the decade, De Kooning’s use of a Bell-Opticon projector inspired Kline to project his brush drawings onto his studio wall, transforming them into large-scale ideograms. These experiments marked the beginning of Kline’s characteristic abstractions incorporating powerful lines and rapidly developed gestures of black paint on white ground. Critics have long debated, whether Kline's black and white paintings were inspired by Japanese calligraphy. However, the painter denied it, claiming, that his inspirations came from unconscious sources.
In 1950, Franz had his first one-man exhibition at Charles Egan Gallery in Manhattan. The show consisted of eleven abstract paintings. Also, in the late 1950's, Franz experimented with color, using planes, painted in different hues to evoke a more complex sense of space. His style became looser, and by the 1960's, some of his pictures became almost monochromatic. By this stage, Kline's reputation was secure as a leading Abstract Expressionist.
During his lifetime, the painter took part in many exhibitions, including the documenta II and III in 1959 and 1964 in Kassel, Germany, Venice Biennale in 1960, "American Vanguard" exhibition in 1961 and others. Also, he taught at several educational institutions, including Black Mountain College in 1952, Pratt Institute in 1953 and others.
Quotations:
"I paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse in me."
"The nature of anguish is translated into different forms."
"You instinctively like what you can't do."
"It's a wonderful thing to be in love with The Square."
"You paint the way you have to in order to give. That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving."
"I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important."
Membership
Franz Kline was a member of informal group of artists, musicians and poets, called New York School.
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Franz Kline was a squat, muscular man with powerful arms, a thin mustache and expressive, sloping eyebrows, gathered at the center of his forehead.
Quotes from others about the person
"Kline frequently spoke of a painting as a "situation", and of the first strokes of paint on canvas as "the beginning of the situation". When painting, he said, he tried to rid his mind of everything else and "attack it completely from that situation." — Edward Lucie-Smith, an English writer
Connections
Franz Kline married Elizabeth Vincent Parsons, a British ballet dancer, on December 5, 1938.
Franz Kline
With its detailed yet thoroughly readable text and 170 illustrations (many published here for the first time), this book brings to light much new information about Kline, a leading figure among the Abstract Expressionists, and enriches the readers' appreciation and understanding of his art.
1994
Franz Kline (1910-1962)
This landmark exhibition catalog surveys the entire career of one of the last great painters of high modernism, Franz Kline. It features over 70 major works, including paintings, drawings, sketches, and documentary material. This volume traces Kline's art from its beginnings to his last painting in 1961, just a few months before the artist's death.