Franz Kline

1910–1962

Although Franz Kline is best known for the abstract paintings he created between 1949 and 1961, he began his career making figurative works, many of which contained Social Realist–inspired references to the concerns of the urban lower classes. In 1950, however, Kline showed a group of paintings at New York’s Egan Gallery that established him as one of the preeminent practitioners of Abstract Expressionism. Over the next twelve years he painted with large-scale gestural strokes, frequently using a limited palette of black and white paint, to create such vigorous works as Mahoning.

Despite its majestic dynamism, Mahoning was based on a small, quickly brushed ink study (also owned by the Whitney) that Kline had made several years earlier on a page from a telephone book. He carefully translated the drawing into a larger-scale painting with the aid of a Bell-Opticon projector, a magnification tool introduced to him by friend and fellow artist Willem de Kooning. As Kline noted: “Some of the pictures I work on a long time and . . . there are other pictures that come off right away. The immediacy can be accomplished in a picture that’s been worked on for a long time just as well as if it’s been done rapidly.” Although many critics compared these monochromatic works with the gestures of Eastern calligraphy, Kline insisted that he was not writing with paint, for he painted as much with white as with black. The tension between light and dark creates the monumental forces of dynamic movement and taut architectural structure that make Mahoning an emblematic work of action painting.

Wikipedia entry

Introduction

Franz Kline (May 23, 1910 – May 13, 1962) was an American painter. He is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Kline, along with other action painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, John Ferren, and Lee Krasner, as well as local poets, dancers, and musicians, came to be known as the informal group, the New York School. Although he explored the same innovations to painting as the other artists in this group, Kline's work is distinct in itself and has been revered since the 1950s.

Wikidata identifier

Q374492

View the full Wikipedia entry

Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 12, 2025.

Getty record

Introduction

American painter.

Country of birth

United States

Roles

Artist, painter, photographer

ULAN identifier

500007696

Names

Franz Kline, Franz Jozef Kline, Franz Rowe Kline

View the full Getty record

Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 12, 2025.

Not on view

First acquired
1957

Date of birth
May 23, 1910

API
artists/707