Summary
Highlights
Around 1960, Franz Kline, despite selling paintings, stubbornly used house paint over fine art-grade paints. His gallerist, Sidney Janis, even tried to secretly replace his house paint with Winsor Newton paints, only for Kline to immediately revert back to his preferred hardware store paints. Kline favored house paint for its low cost, consumerist nature, and distinct material properties: it was fluid, dried to a hard, flat, and glossy surface, and its low viscosity allowed for easy application across a canvas.
Before 1950, Kline primarily painted figurative works. A pivotal moment occurred when he visited Willem De Kooning, who introduced him to a projector. Kline, who at the time sketched figures like chairs on phonebook pages, projected these small drawings onto a large wall. The enlargement abstracted the images, making the original figures and phonebook text unrecognizable, leaving only black shapes on a white (or yellow) background. This experience revealed to Kline the abstract language he wanted to pursue, focusing on figure on ground, or black on white.
Becoming an abstract painter did not mean an end to drawing for Kline. His seemingly spontaneous paintings, like 'Chief,' were actually the result of careful preliminary sketches. Kline would create abstract sketches and then meticulously transfer them onto large canvases using his preferred fast-dripping enamel house paint, demonstrating a deliberate and iterative creative process.
Kline's black and white paintings are more complex than they appear. They involve an iterative layering of black over white, and white over black. Furthermore, Kline utilized different shades of white, incorporating both cool, crisp whites and warmer whites, adding depth and subtlety to his compositions. These works are often termed 'action paintings,' as they visually record the artist's movements, akin to a dancer's performance, on the canvas.