Franz Kline Analysis

Franz Kline born 1910, died 1962 was an American painter born in Pennsylvania. Famous for being associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940's and 1950's. In 1948, Willem de Kooning advised an artistically frustrated Kline to project a sketch onto the wall of his studio, using a Bell-Opticon projector Kline described the projection as such:

"A four by five inch black drawing of a rocking chair...loomed in gigantic black strokes which eradicated any image, the strokes expanding as entities in themselves, unrelated to any entity but that of their own existence."

As Elaine de Kooning suggests, it was then that Kline dedicated himself to large-scale, abstract works. However, even though Willem de Kooning recalls that Kline delved into abstraction "all of a sudden, he plunged into it", he also concedes that it took considerable time, stating that "Franz had a vision of something and sometimes it takes quite a while to work it out." Over the next two years, Kline's brushstrokes became completely non-representative, fluid, and dynamic. It was also at this time that Kline began only painting in black and white. He explains how his monochrome palette is meant to depict negative and positive space by saying, "I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important." His use of black and white is very similar to paintings made by de Kooning andPollock during the 1940s. There also seem to be references to Japanese calligraphy in Kline's black and white paintings, although he always denied that connection.

Japanese Calligraphy is something I decided to look further into in my studies as I particularly liked the artistic nature of the Kanji alphabet, after exploring this and the marks made using this language. I then wanted to explore the nature of the ancient way of writing and how elegant and free flowing it is in comparison with modern Japan and the clean cut, neon lights, futuristic city that is presented in modern media today.