Franz Kline 1950’s American artist

  Franz Kline belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionist Artists whose artistic innovation by the 1950s had been recognised across the Atlantic including Paris. New York School Abstract Expressionism represented by Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, Albert Kotin and others became the leading art movement of the postwar era.

   Franz Kline's story reads like a movie plot: Young artist starts out with high hopes, spends years struggling without success, eventually finds a style, becomes an "overnight sensation" and dies too soon. His vision focused on one of the ways to approach Abstract Expressionism was through psychic vision. His paintings didn't need to have a meaning, because that wasn't their purpose. and that exactly what I loved about his work and got me to read and discover more about this artist.

How does my own work relate with Franz

Kline’s work?

When I was looking for an artist to relate my work with, I came cross Kline's black and white paintings and I found them liberating, in other words opposite to everything I have been trying to do in my work.  I have always been trying to paint or create work that has a meaning. finally here is an artist that created paintings that were supposed to make one feel, not comprehend. I love it.

New York really didn't care much that it had talent back from England ready to take on the world. Franz struggled for years as a figurative artist, doing portraits (for two loyal patrons) that won him a modest reputation. He also painted city- and landscapes, and occasionally resorted to painting barroom murals to get up the rent money. In the mid 1940s, he met fellow artists Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, and began to follow his own growing interest in trying new ways of painting.

Kline had been noodling around with black and white for years, creating small brush drawings and projecting them onto the wall of his studio. Now he got rather serious about creating the projected images using just his arm, brush and mental imagery. The pictures that began to emerge were given a solo exhibition in New York in 1950. As a result of the show, Franz became a Name and his large, black and white compositions - likened to grids, or Oriental calligraphy - achieved notoriety.
           
     (need name, date and size )                                                 

These two paintings are by Franz Kline, both painted in 1959, shows the freedom of the way the brush strokes are moved cross the canvas. His spontaneous and intense style, focusing less, or not at all, on figures or imagery, but on the actual brush strokes and use of canvas. For most of Kline's [mature and representative] work, however, he would prepare many draft sketches – notably, commonly on refuse telephone book pages – before going to make his "spontaneous" work.

''Spontaneous work'' sounds good to me, that made me want to look more closely at kline’s painting style and try to do it his way; feel  the paintings instead of funding a meaning for them, that encourages me to get away from a more detailed painting style and understand simple, big marks, big colours, black and white, diagonals, and a different way of working. I want to learn how to simplify my work, which had become needlessly fussy.

Since Kline was working before the invention of acrylics, he of course used oil paint, as do I usually, but in the canvas below I decided to use acrylic just to challenge and push myself to use different medium, knowing that it dries quicker and I will have no time to correct or wipe it off.

The painting on canvas (20 x 35 cm)  below is of a mosque's arches from my imagination as I tried to close my eyes and paint while listening to some Moroccan music; all to do with feelings and the free use of colours and mark making (spontaneously) with no intention to reflect a meaning or  message for the spectator. I have painted two other canvas shown below also with acrylics using the same atmosphere and techniques. When i decided to stop working on the painting I stepped three meters back and took a good look at the painting and it was like opening a present, a surprise,  but I couldn't say weather I liked or hated it but I have experienced it and I was then looking and feeling the painting, then i told myself, well may be that what Kline meant... I am still searching  ...!!

 

        meriem eljazouli x