From NYT review, Roberta Smith:..."Kline had done no such thing. Arriving in New York in 1938, he dedicated most of his energies to an Ashcan-related representational style. After getting to know de Kooning and some other artists, he began in 1946 to broach abstraction in tentative fits and starts. Then, around 1949, he realized that when enlarged, the small ink studies he had been making for years were not only nearly abstract, but they also had an imposing, built-in sense of scale.
Kline’s representational period is almost an embarrassing anomaly in the annals of Abstract Expressionism. It has not become the stuff of legend, like his colleagues’ confrontations with Europe. Instead it has received little attention and sometimes been ignored altogether. This oversight is partly remedied by “Franz Kline: Coal and Steel,” a poignant, revelatory exhibition of some 50 works from throughout Kline’s career at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College." |
"... that the precarious balancing acts of Kline’s art from 1950 on are not simply powerful formal devices. They reflect the ups and downs of Kline’s life, as well as the fortunes of the Lehigh Valley, which flourished when he was a child but declined precipitously during his adulthood, when he made frequent visits home.
The works themselves reveal how Kline’s considerable talents for drawing and painting culminate in the architectonic calligraphies of his mature style. He was always a dazzling draftsman who made something of nearly every piece of paper that came his way, whether with a sharp pencil, pen and ink, or brush and ink. More important, he was almost from the start an impressive painter. Had he never made his black-and-whites, he would still be an artist worth cherishing.
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The small but panoramic “Lehigh River” (1944) consists of inspired flurries of strokes that already hint, in miniature, at the slashing and propulsive brushstroke-forms of Kline’s mature style. The river, the factories huddled on its banks, the town climbing a distant hill, the train racing across the center — all are described in a variety of marks made primarily with a narrow palette knife or a paintbrush handle (which provides scratched indications of anything from weeds to house or factory windows). Equally striking is the painting’s rich array of miscegenating browns, ochers, creams and oranges.
When Kline turned to color late in his career, the resulting paintings are often considered his weakest. But these early works reveal him to have been an inspired colorist and show what he might have reclaimed, had he not died of heart disease in 1962, at only 51.
In addition, some works narrow the palette to explore variations of two or three colors, as if heading for the ultimate reduction to black and white. “Chief (Train)” (1942), an image of a toylike locomotive that shares its title with a work from the first Egan show that is now in the Museum of Modern Art, is a little symphony in black and red.
Even better is “PA Street (Pennsylvania Mining Town)” (1947), a row of ramshackle houses in many shades of gray, beneath a deep-pink sky and beside a deep-blue-green street. (The slightly slumping, almost cartoonish quality of the houses can evoke Lyonel Feiningerat his early best, but Mr. Mattison also points to the cheap, flimsy buildings of the region’s company towns.) And “Pennsylvania Landscape” of 1947-49 renders a house, some hills, a bridge, the river and a train in robust strokes of bright, acid-to-Kelly greens offset by crucial touches of orange, brown and cream.
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