Franz Kline

Franz Kline, in full Franz Rowe Kline, was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on 23 May, 1910.
Kline is among the most prominent exponents of abstract expressionism.

His father, of German origin and owner of a saloon, took his own life in 1917, when Franz was 7 years old, possibly due to financial difficulties. His mother found a job as a nurse and the artist was housed at the Episcopal Church Home in Jonestown, Pennsylvania, with his brothers.

He attended high school at Girard College in Philadelphia, an academy for fatherless boys.

Training in illustration and drawing and moving to New York

After graduation, he studied art at Boston University from 1931 to 1935. After finishing his studies, he moved to London, where he lived with Martha and Frank Hahn. He copied works from museums and galleries and drew landscapes of the city.

From 1937 to 1938, he attended painting and life drawing courses at the Heatherley School of Fine Art. There he met his future wife and in 1938 he moved to New York. He found work as a designer and in 1939 worked for a set designer.

In the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, the artist produced urban views of New York and views of the mining district, where he spent his childhood, and painted murals and portraits on commission.

During this period, he was awarded prizes at annual exhibitions of the National Academies of Design.

The de Kooning influence

Kline’s most recognisable style also materialised through the influence of his friend Willem de Kooning and his wife Elaine de Kooning.

Kline began to devote himself to large-scale abstract works.

Maximum abstraction: whites and blacks and the renunciation of colour

From the mid-1940s, the artist became interested in the expressive possibilities of abstraction, beginning to abandon colour and figuration, typical of his initial realist style, tending instead to simplify and reduce compositional elements in violent brushstrokes of blacks and whites on canvas with less or more density.

Around 1948, he enlarged his black and white drawings with a projector, finding in the expressive force and magnificence of the shapes and brushstrokes the confirmation of his decision to turn towards the purity of abstraction.

The 1950s – The return of colour, the consecration of Franz Kline in the Olympus of abstract expressionism

At the Talent 1950 exhibition at the Kootz Gallery, organised by Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro, one of his abstract paintings was exhibited, shortly afterwards, his first solo show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York with 11 abstract paintings (1950).

He participated in the Ninth Street Show, held at 60 East Ninth Street, and the American Vanguard Art for Paris Exhibition, held at the Sidney Janis Gallery – These events established Kline as one of the most significant artists of the emerging Abstract Expressionism.

The mid-1950s marked the return of colour to his palette, first with irregular touches and then with increasingly large segments.

Sidney Janis became his gallerist of choice in ’56 and organised solo exhibitions for Kline in 1956, 1958, and 1961.

Kline’s first European solo exhibition was held at Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome, followed by another at Galleria del Naviglio in Milan in ’58.

He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1960, on this occasion, he travelled through Italy for a month.

The last ten years – Numerous exhibitions and biennials

In the decade before his death, he exhibited his works in several group exhibitions, including The New Decade – 35 American Painters and Sculptors at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1955), 12 Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1956).

The major touring exhibition The New American Painting, organised by the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art (1958) was shown in Milan, Madrid, Berlin, Basel, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and London.

Kline also participated in international events. The Venice Biennale, in 1956 and 1960, and the Carnegie International, in 1955, 1958 and 1961.

Franz Kline died prematurely on 13 May 1962 in New York, due to heart failure.