Lot Essay
Kline had restricted his palette to black and white in the early 1950s to focus on the formal concerns of composition and spatial movement. He had started to paint abstractly only after having seen one of his drawings enlarged and projected on the wall by a Bell Opticon overhead projector. His friend Elaine de Kooning reported that Kline was astonished by what he saw: 'A four by five inch brush drawing of the rocking chair...loomed in gigantic black strokes which eradicated any image, the strokes expanding as entities themselves, unrelated to any reality but that of their own existence...From that day, Franz Kline's style of painting changed completely' (I. Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, New York 1970, p. 249).
While Kline's paintings are often seen as a calligraphic deposit of black paint on a white background, Swanee shows just how complex his technique really was. Bold swaths of black painted with six-inch-wide housepainter's brushes create powerful horizontals and verticals that have the feel of cantilevered steel beams. A large black triangle seems to support the cantilever in the center. Patches of lavender and ochre gleam out like jewels from beneath the huge planar masses of black and white, unexpectedly enriching and enlivening the atmosphere. A fully loaded white brush slathers over the black, creating an opposing white triangle to the supporting black one. The brush's edge grazes the black, producing a gray that seems a result of pure velocity and energy, carving the black shape and intensely modifying the structure of the picture. Another nearly dry brush skims the surface in the lower quadrant, vividly depositing its pigment in a headlong dash of featherlight touch. The result is a monumentality created out of a dynamic balance that is characteristic of the best Kline paintings. 'The huge, precisely shaped strokes and white areas strike like a clap of thunder, as if from outside the canvas; and though the image is artfully structured within its format, the pounding impact cannot be contained, so that the composition must be interpreted as a detail: the focal center of a vast complex of energy, a field simultaneously bombarded by equivalent positive and negative forces' (W. Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, Cambridge and London 1983, p. 89). The overwhelming impression is not one of refinement but rather a boldness born 'as a result of a Herculean reconciliation of opposing forces' (L. Alloway, "Sign and Surface (Notes on Black and White Painting in New York)," Quadrum, 1960, vol. 9, p. 54).
Kline returned to the image of Swanee in 1959-1960, creating a larger version, Lehigh V Span, now in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The title refers to a railroad bridge in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, near the artist's hometown of Wilkes-Barre, that the artist had painted as part of a mural for the town hall in 1946. The bridge's distinctive triangular spans, clearly seen in the mural, seem the precedent for the two paintings' interlocking triangular forms.
While Kline's paintings are often seen as a calligraphic deposit of black paint on a white background, Swanee shows just how complex his technique really was. Bold swaths of black painted with six-inch-wide housepainter's brushes create powerful horizontals and verticals that have the feel of cantilevered steel beams. A large black triangle seems to support the cantilever in the center. Patches of lavender and ochre gleam out like jewels from beneath the huge planar masses of black and white, unexpectedly enriching and enlivening the atmosphere. A fully loaded white brush slathers over the black, creating an opposing white triangle to the supporting black one. The brush's edge grazes the black, producing a gray that seems a result of pure velocity and energy, carving the black shape and intensely modifying the structure of the picture. Another nearly dry brush skims the surface in the lower quadrant, vividly depositing its pigment in a headlong dash of featherlight touch. The result is a monumentality created out of a dynamic balance that is characteristic of the best Kline paintings. 'The huge, precisely shaped strokes and white areas strike like a clap of thunder, as if from outside the canvas; and though the image is artfully structured within its format, the pounding impact cannot be contained, so that the composition must be interpreted as a detail: the focal center of a vast complex of energy, a field simultaneously bombarded by equivalent positive and negative forces' (W. Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, Cambridge and London 1983, p. 89). The overwhelming impression is not one of refinement but rather a boldness born 'as a result of a Herculean reconciliation of opposing forces' (L. Alloway, "Sign and Surface (Notes on Black and White Painting in New York)," Quadrum, 1960, vol. 9, p. 54).
Kline returned to the image of Swanee in 1959-1960, creating a larger version, Lehigh V Span, now in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The title refers to a railroad bridge in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, near the artist's hometown of Wilkes-Barre, that the artist had painted as part of a mural for the town hall in 1946. The bridge's distinctive triangular spans, clearly seen in the mural, seem the precedent for the two paintings' interlocking triangular forms.