Cardinal (1950), for example, cannot be viewed as purely gestural abstraction for two very important reasons.įirst, the painting’s various black strokes can, if viewed from certain angles, come to resemble the very figure of a bird that the title indicates. Given that many of Kline’s early sketches were done with black ink on rice paper-the very materials used by classical Chinese painters and calligraphers for centuries-this identification would prove to be an uphill battle.Ĭompounding the futility of denying Kline’s Eastern influence was the fact that many of his early large-scale canvasses present ideographs in the most elemental sense-symbols that offer both lexical and representational meaning. The calligraphic quality of Kline’s early mature work required Greenberg-at the time attempting to declaim Abstract Expressionism the first purely American pictorial art-to reinterpret Kline in a way that did not simply transfer laurels from Europe to Asia, but rather located the startling effect of Kline’s black lines in something essentially American. On the contrary, reviews of Kline’s first two one-man shows at midtown Manhattan’s Charles Egan Gallery tended almost uniformly to claim, for better or for worse, that the paintings were, in the words of one critic, “magnified improvisations of the signs and symbols found in Chinese and Japanese writing and painting.” However, Kline’s membership in this group was not self-evident in the early 1950s when the artist had only just begun producing his striking oversized pictures rendered primarily in thick black lines and complimentary white polygons. The great American art critic Clement Greenberg always included Franz Kline on his list of “American-Type” painters.
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