The \’black-and-white\’ artist, whose journey back into colour was cut short

May 23, On This Day  

He is dubbed one of the most important yet problematic artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York, and a stalwart of the New York School, alongside luminaries like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, John Ferren, and Lee Krasner. 

Franz Kline was born on May 23, 1910, and was a distinct and prolific American artist during the 1940s and 1950s. 

Interestingly, Kline\’s artistic training focused on rather traditional illustrating and drafting. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, he worked figuratively, painting landscapes and cityscapes in addition to commissioned portraits and murals. 

But soon his personal style, using simplified forms, became increasingly abstract. Many figures he depicted were based on locomotives, stark landscapes, and large mechanical shapes of his native, coal-mining community in Pennsylvania — but only apparent to viewers because the pieces were named after those places and objects, not because they actually look like the subject! 

Soon, Kline worked further into abstraction and eventually abandoned representationalism. From the late 1940s onward, Kline began generalizing his figurative subjects into lines and planes which fit together much like the works of Cubism of the time. 

Over the next few years, Kline’s brushstrokes became completely non-representative, fluid, and dynamic. It was also at this time that Kline began painting only in black and white, taking this monochrome palette to depict negative and positive space. 

Kline was dubbed the “black and white artist”, a label which stuck and which he would occasionally feel restricted by. In the later 1950s, in such paintings as Requiem (1958), Kline began experimenting with more complex chiaroscuro instead of focusing on a strict monochromatic palette. Then in 1958, he reintroduced the use of color in his work through colorful accents in his black and white paintings.  

Sadly, even while this exploration back to color-use was still in development, Kline died of rheumatic heart disease, 10 days before his 52nd birthday, on May 13, 1962. 

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