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Franz KlineChatham Square1948
1948
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
About the Item
Signed (at lower left): FRANZ KLINE
RECORDED: Elizabeth Johnson, “Franz Kline’s Roots in Coal and Steel—at Allentown Art Museum,” Artblog (December 21. 2012), illus. in color // Tim Keane, “Painting at the Speed of Sight: Franz Kline’s Rapid Transit,” Hyperallergic (March 2013) // Emily Genauer, “New Gallery; ‘Laundry-Ticket’ Art,” The New York Herald Tribune (October 1962), illus.
EXHIBITED: Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D.C., October 30–December 27, 1962; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, January 21–March 10, 1963; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, April 14–May 20, 1963, Franz Kline Memorial Exhibition, pp. 21 fig. 33, 51 no. 33 // Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, October 22–December 8, 1968, From El Greco to Pollock: Early and Late Works by European and American Artists // Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, November 27, 1985–March 2, 1986; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, April 17–June 9, 1986; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, June 26–September 28, 1986, The Vital Gesture: Franz Kline in Retrospect, p. 51 fig. 49 illus. in color // Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley, Allentown, Pennsylvania, October 7, 2012–January 13, 2013; Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, New York, February 8–March 5, 2013; Franz Kline: Coal and Steel, pp. 55 fig. 44 illus. in color, 111
EX COLL.: the artist; to I. David Orr (1904–1997), Long Island, New York; to his estate, 1997 until the present
Originally trained as a figurative painter, Kline was an exceptional draftsman. Unlike other post-war Abstract Expressionists who sought out European precedents, Kline embraced the urban landscape of New York City and rural industrial scenes around his childhood home of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Marked by a distinctly realist approach, the street scenes, interiors, and portraits from this period show Kline grappling with what he wanted to paint and who he wanted to be as an artist. Although figurative in appearance, the paintings reveal the flattened space, reduction of form, bold outlines, and daring composition that would define Kline’s mature work.
- Creator:Franz Kline (1910 - 1962, American)
- Creation Year:1948
- Dimensions:Height: 41 in (104.14 cm)Width: 30 in (76.2 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:Seller: M 10468D.0281stDibs: LU2316115722
Franz Kline
Franz Kline (1910 – 1962) was an American painter. He is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Kline, along with other action painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Lee Krasner, as well as local poets, dancers, and musicians came to be known as the informal group, the New York School. Although he explored the same innovations to painting as the other artists in this group, Kline's work is distinct in itself and has been revered since the 1950s. Kline was born in Wilkes-Barre, a small coal-mining community in Eastern Pennsylvania. He studied art at Boston University from 1931 to 1935, then spent a year at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London where he met his future wife, Elizabeth V. Parsons, a British ballet dancer. She returned to the United States with Kline in 1938, and Kline worked as a designer for a department store in New York state. He moved to New York City in 1939 and worked for a scenic designer. It was during this time in New York that he developed his artistic techniques and gained recognition as a significant artist. He later taught at a number of institutions including Black Mountain College in North Carolina and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He spent summers from 1956 to 1962 painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Kline's artistic training focused on traditional illustrating and drafting. During the late 1930s and early 1940s he worked figuratively, painting landscapes and cityscapes in addition to commissioned portraits and murals. His individual style can be first seen in the mural series Hot Jazz, which he painted for a New York bar in 1940. The series revealed his interest in breaking down representative forms into quick, rudimentary brushstrokes. The personal style he developed during this time, using simplified forms, became increasingly more abstract. Many of the figures he depicted are based on the locomotives, stark landscapes, and large mechanical shapes of his native, coal-mining community in Pennsylvania. This is sometimes only apparent to viewers because the pieces are named after those places and objects, not because they actually look like the subject. With the influence of the contemporary New York art scene, Kline worked further into abstraction and eventually abandoned representationalism. From the late 1940s onward, Kline began generalizing his figurative subjects into lines and planes which fit together much like the works of Cubism of the time.
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EX COLL.: the artist; to I. David Orr (1904–1997), Long Island, New York; to his estate, 1997 until the present
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Charles Howard graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1921 as a journalism major, and pursued graduate studies in English at Harvard and Columbia Universities before embarking on a two-year trip to Europe. Howard went to Europe as a would-be writer. But a near-religious experience, seeing a picture by Giorgione in a remote town outside of Venice, proved a life-altering epiphany. In his own words, “I cut the tour at once and hurried immediately back to Paris, to begin painting. I have been painting whenever I could ever since” (Charles Howard, “What Concerns Me,” Magazine of Art 39, no. 2 [February 1946], p. 63). Giorgione’s achievement, in utilizing a structured and rational visual language of art to convey high emotion on canvas, instantly convinced Howard that painting, and not literature, offered the best vehicle to express what he wanted to say. Howard returned to the United States in 1925, confirmed in his intent to become an artist.
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