Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist
Marlborough Gallery, Zurich
Private Collection, Geneva
Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Few painterly styles bespeak the intellect and impassioned will behind an era-defining movement like Franz Kline's monochrome compositions. Kline's paintings capture Abstract Expressionism at its zenith, as fluid paint gives way to the rigorous motions and firm resolve that underpinned the ideas of a generation that included Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, and Mark Rothko. Embedded amongst these titans of the twentieth century, Kline nevertheless stood apart, pursuing his artistic end with an ascetic focus that is written across all great works by his hand; from the most monumental of canvases to intimate of studies. Presented here is a painting on paper of supreme quality from the earliest years of Kline's definitive style, circa 1951. As it was, Kline would die but days before his 52nd birthday in 1962, cutting short the emphatic contribution he made to post-war American art and making such examples as the present Untitled painting on paper still rarer to market.

Over an elegant and precise scale, the simple beauty of his mark here is palpable and fearless. Kline's works on paper were essential elements to his painterly process, studying the splicing and fragmentation of compositional space with the crisp edges of a single brushstroke, guiding him in defining the lattices and assemblies of his larger canvases. In Untitled, for example, there is a freshness and urgency that is concealed in Kline's oils on canvas. Here, the negative space of the unblemished paper renders itself more starkly against the calligraphic sweeps of ink, creating pulsating enclaves that float against the receding black. In this way, this Untitled piece conjures a cast of shadows or architectonic forms that abut and brace one another. As part of the group known widely as the New York School, such assertive verticality seems only fitting as Manhattan found itself the center of the avant-garde after the Second World War, championed by the foremost critics Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg. The present work is wonderfully of its time, a foundational piece that illustrates the important transposition from Cubism into Abstract Expressionism into Minimalism across the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Kline's mature career is comparably short relative to his contemporaries. Born in 1910 in Pennsylvania, he suffered a great loss when his faster committed suicide when the artist was only seven. Kline was sent to a boarding school for orphaned boys in Philadelphia until the age of fifteen, and from there to Boston University and London in 1935, where he would meet his future wife. Upon his return to the United States, arriving in New York in 1938, Kline took up his trade as a freelance artist and muralist, perhaps most notably producing the paintings on the wall of the Bleeker Street Tavern in Greenwich Village in 1940, known as Hot Jazz. Whilst painting figuratively, often depicting the hard landscapes and machinery of the mining towns of his native Pennsylvania throughout the 1940s, the initial passage of Kline's career reveals an undeniable stylistic energy and thrust; a sense of composition defined by fixed points and inelastic lines. His paintings captured a bleakness and somber reality that echoed the early works of Rothko, for example. It was a vision of an industrial America that was trying to wrest itself from the long shadows of the Great Depression and wartime. Kline's breakthrough, alleged to have been borne of a conversation with Willem and Elaine De Kooning in 1948, therefore, would be an organic development of his early style, shedding the socially conscious imagery for a chorus of gestural monochromatic strokes. It placed him squarely at the cutting edge of abstract painting, emerging beside Rothko – whose 1947 debut solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery presented his nascent swaths of color – and Pollock, whose drip-pour technique developed fully in 1947. It marked the beginning of Abstract Expressionism in earnest, and the anointing of its great pioneers that included Kline, Pollock, Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and Lee Krasner.

The present Untitled work from the early 1950s stands as an exceptional example of Franz Kline's inimitable style as the artist himself unravels and furthers the potentialities of Abstract Expressionism at its peak. His paintings convey a uniquely subjective force, projecting the shadow of his gesture across the surface and capturing the experience of creation in a single frame. Here, in Untitled, the distance between Kline's intent and the painted surface is at its shortest – executed with a deliberation and dispatch that makes it amongst those most special of artworks that seize the artist's mind in motion. Kline's place in the historical canon cannot be overestimated, and his works from 1948 to his death are the prized holdings of many major global museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Cleveland Museum of Art; and the Tate Modern, London.