In part he was inspired by de Kooning's black and white paintings of 1946-49, and - although the story is apocryphal - it is said that de Kooning also inspired him to scale up the work, after he encouraged him to examine it using an enlarger. He had already began to explore an austere black and white palette in a series of ink on paper sketches, but now he brought the technique to canvases and employed house-painting brushes to create broad strokes of black criss-crossing white canvases. Around 1947, under the influence of de Kooning, he also began to abandon figuration and experiment on a large scale with a gestural, abstract technique. At this point, his work was shaped by his love of Old Masters such as Rembrandt, but in 1943 he met Willem de Kooning and began to frequent the Cedar Bar, where he met Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston. He was forced to take odd jobs: he painted murals in bars and sold illustrations to magazines. ![]() The first few years back in New York proved difficult for Kline. Kline's reluctance to attribute hidden meanings to his pictures was important in recommending his work to a later generation of Minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd and Richard Serra.Along with De Kooning and Pollock, Kline was one of the examplary artists heralded in Harold Rosenberg's definition of Action Painting. The powerful forms of his motifs, and their impression of velocity, were intended to translate into an experience of structure and presence which the viewer could almost palpably feel.Yet Kline saw his method less as a means to express himself than as a way to create a physical engagement with the viewer. ![]() The poet and curator Frank O'Hara saw Kline as the quintessential 'action painter', and Kline's black and white paintings certainly helped establish gestural abstraction as an important tendency within Abstract Expressionism.Franz Kline is most famous for his black and white abstractions, which have been likened variously to New York's cityscape, the landscape of his childhood home in rural Pennsylvania, and Japanese calligraphy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |