Franz Kline

Franz Kline at Sidney Janis (1950s exhibition poster)

1958

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.