In 1950, Franz Kline showed a group of large-scale black-and-white canvases in his first solo exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery on 57th Street in New York. Kline is largely remembered and justly celebrated for these powerfully gestural black-and-white paintings incorporating abstract motifs and physical brushwork. Less known, however, is the stylistic experimentation that preceded and, in some ways, presaged the artist’s now iconic work.
Kline was a central member of the group of downtown artists who formed the nucleus of the so-called “New York School” of Abstract Expressionists. Kline’s best friend was Willem de Kooning. In her 2018 book, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art, Mary Gabriel called the relationship between Kline and de Kooning “one of the great friendships in modern art history” (p.192).
Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Kline lost his father to suicide when when he was seven. His mother, unable to care for four children while she attended nursing school, sent Franz to an orphanage. After she remarried Andrew Snyder, a foreman with the Lehigh Valley Railroad, Kline’s mother successfully struggled to reclaim custody. When he was fifteen, Kline rejoined his mother, siblings, and stepfather in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, an anthracite coal-mining town. Kline’s years there, as the town declined amidst labor violence, were formative. Even after he moved to New York, he made frequent visits to the place he identified as home, to visit his mother who continued to offer emotional and financial support and to reconnect with the gritty Pennsylvania industrial landscape.
Kline studied art at Boston University, and then at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, London, an art school that focused on portraiture, figurative painting, sculpture and printmaking. Trained as a figurative painter, he became an exceptional draftsman. When Kline left London, he settled in New York. Unlike other post-war Abstract Expressionists who sought out European precedents, Kline embraced the urban landscape of New York City, a variation of the industrial scenes of his adolescence. 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. In 1958, Kline famously told his friend, the poet Frank O’Hara: “Hell, half the world wants to be like Thoreau at Walden worrying about the noise of traffic on the way to Boston; the other half use up their lives being part of that noise. I like the second half. Right?” (Gabriel, p. 193, quoted from O’Hara, "Franz Kline Talking," Evergreen Review 2 [Autumn 1958], p. 68). Although Kline’s early work is figurative in appearance, the paintings reveal the flattened space, reduction of form, bold outlines and daring composition that would come to define Kline’s mature work. Of these early works, art critic Roberta Smith wrote, “The works themselves reveal how Kline’s considerable talents for drawing and painting culminate in the architectonic calligraphies of his mature style…. He was almost from the start an impressive painter. Had he never made his black-and whites, he would still be an artist worth cherishing.” (“Expressionism’s Sooty Anomaly,” New York Times, March 1, 2013).
Kline’s first decade in New York was marked by struggle and poverty. He arrived in 1938–39 with an English wife, Elizabeth Parsons, a Sadler Wells ballerina. Parsons had a lifelong struggle with schizophrenia and depression which, resulted in periodic institutionalizations, adding marital stress to financial worries. The marriage failed, but they never divorced. In twenty-four years in New York, Kline moved fourteen times. In 1943 and again in 1944, Kline won the S. J. Wallace Truman Prize at the National Academy of Design for two figurative Pennsylvania landscapes, respectively Palmerton, PA (1941, Smithsonian American Art Museum) and Lehigh River (1944, private collection). In 1945 Kline was awarded a commission to paint a historical mural of Lehighton to hang in the hall of the local American Legion Post. The $600 fee was a boon. (The work remained in place until 2016, when the organization sold the mural to the Allentown Art Museum. Restored, it now claims pride of place in the Museum.) Returning to New York in 1946, Kline fell in with the artists who hung out at the Minetta Tavern and the Cedar Tavern, both in Greenwich Village. This was the crowd of non-objective artists about to be known as the “New York School.” Alone much of the time because of his wife’s ill health, Kline found solace, support and companionship among his peers. They found a delightful, and soon a beloved friend.
The story of the epiphany that led Kline to his black and white paintings is reprinted in numerous sources. In Gabriel’s account (pp. 333–34), Kline was visiting with Bill and Elaine de Kooning one evening in 1948, when de Kooning was “enlarging his own drawings by projecting them onto a wall using a Bell-Opticon.” Kline, at the time was making black-and-white drawings on telephone book pages, a source of free paper that suited his budget. He had two of them stuffed into his pockets. Another friend suggested that Kline try some of his drawing with the Bell-Opticon enlarger. Elaine de Kooning was struck by what she saw, an image that “‘loomed in gigantic black strokes.’” She said to Kline, “’Well, why don’t you do that?” He returned to his Ninth Street studio and made his first large scale black-and-white slash painting. Elated, he returned to the de Koonings at 5:30 in the morning, routed them out of bed, and took them to his studio to show what he had done. All three immediately recognized the importance Kline’s breakthrough.
With that painting, Kline became what the writer Pete Hamill called ‘the third glittering star in the Big Three constellation’ along with [Jackson] Pollock and Bill [de Kooning]. It was evident that this was major, that these were the paintings Kline had been born to do. Elaine told Charlie Egan about Franz’s breakthrough, and Charlie offered him a show" (p. 334, quoting Pete Hamill, ‘Beyond the Vital Gesture’, Art and Antiques, May 1990, p.113).
