Facts about Franz Kline
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A native of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Kline worked as a commercial artist and sign painter before his artistic transformation, skills that directly informed his bold, architectural approach to abstract composition.
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Critic Harold Rosenberg's 1952 essay Action Painting became the defining theoretical framework for understanding Franz Kline's gestural abstractions and the broader abstract expressionist movement.
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Kline's signature black-and-white aesthetic emerged partly from financial constraints, as he initially could not afford expensive colored pigments during his early abstract period.
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Kline's radical shift to gestural abstraction was influenced by his study of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, which emphasized spontaneous brushwork and the expressive power of black ink on white surfaces.
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Kline's monumental painting Mahoning, completed in 1956, measures nearly seven by ten feet and is housed in the Museum of Modern Art as one of his most celebrated works.
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After his death in 1962, retrospective exhibitions of Kline's work at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and the Museum of Modern Art solidified his legacy as a pivotal figure in post-war American art.
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Kline's heavy drinking and chain-smoking throughout the 1950s and 1960s contributed to his death from heart disease at age fifty-one in 1962.
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Franz Kline began his career as a figurative painter in the 1940s before abandoning representation entirely to pursue abstract expressionism after moving to New York City in 1948.
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In 1958, Franz Kline's painting Chief sold for $2,000, establishing him as a leading figure in the New York School alongside Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
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Kline's artistic breakthrough occurred in 1950 when he projected a small sketch onto a wall and was electrified by how the enlarged abstract forms resembled the steel bridges and girders of his native Pennsylvania.
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During the 1950s, abstract expressionist Franz Kline created massive black and white paintings using house painter brushes, with individual canvases reaching dimensions of twelve feet or more.