Franz Kline
1910–1962American · American Modernism 1910–1960
Black bars on white, at architectural scale, made with house-painter's brushes. The story goes that he saw one of his small drawings enlarged in a projector and understood immediately what he should be doing.
Franz Kline's color palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each. Each swatch is an interpretation of the materials behind it, not a sample taken from a single work. How the palettes are made
Girder black
Massive black strokes — bridge girders, railway trestles.
Material: Commercial black enamel, house-painter brush
RGB(13, 10, 8)
Active white
White painted actively — not background but positive form.
Material: Commercial white enamel, house-painter brush
RGB(233, 224, 216)
Dry brush grey
Grey where the loaded brush runs dry.
Material: Dragged brush, partially loaded
RGB(123, 122, 120)
Blurred edge
Where black meets white imprecisely.
Material: Wet-on-wet overlap of black and white enamel
RGB(75, 74, 72)
Canvas warmth
Bare canvas visible where neither black nor white reaches.
Material: Unprimed cotton duck canvas
RGB(219, 200, 168)
Late color accent
Occasional vivid color in late paintings.
Material: Cadmium orange-red enamel
RGB(200, 74, 42)
Pigments used: Cadmium yellow
Formation
From the Pennsylvania coal region, trained in Boston and London in a traditional figurative curriculum, and worked for years as a competent representational painter of urban scenes and portraits. The change came around 1949–50, in his late thirties, and was abrupt. He was close to de Kooning, and the two of them shared the black-and-white vocabulary in those years to the point where the influence runs both ways.
Technique
Fast, large and physically committed. Kline worked with commercial decorators' brushes, up to twenty centimetres wide, and cheap enamel house paint, on canvases several metres across. He composed from small sketches — frequently made on torn telephone directory pages — which he then enlarged, so the apparent spontaneity is the enlargement of a considered mark rather than an improvisation. Crucially, the white is painted as actively as the black: he worked white over black and black over white repeatedly, so the white is a positive form and not a background.
The palette
Black and white, and the exclusion is the whole proposition. By removing colour he removes everything that might be read as depiction, atmosphere or mood, leaving structure, speed and weight. The blacks are commercial enamel, slightly glossy and dense; the whites are house paint, chalky and opaque. He introduced colour again in the late 1950s, and the results are generally regarded as less resolved, which he seems to have suspected himself.
Legacy
The gestural mark at architectural scale is one of the durable ideas of the New York School, and the black-and-white paintings have been read persistently as calligraphic — a comparison he rejected, pointing out that he was making a structure, not writing. The debt to enlargement and to the accidental discovery of scale is one of the better-documented origin stories in twentieth-century painting.
By Pigmentoria · Published · Palette: interpretive reconstruction
Further reading: Franz Kline — Harry F. GaughAs an Amazon Associate, Pigmentoria earns from qualifying purchases. This page may contain affiliate links.
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Working at the same time
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