Lot Essay
Painted in 1956, Sabro is the first of four paintings of the same title done by Kline from 1956 to 1961. The title refers to Sabro Hasegawa, an artist who was a friend of Kline and Isamu Noguchi. Hasegawa was instrumental in promoting Kline's work in Japan and wrote an article titled "The Beauty of Black and White" in the Tokyo magazine Bokubi as early as 1951.
Franz Kline is viewed as the master of black and white Abstract Expressionist painting, using the two colors as counterpoints in compositions of gestural velocity. The reduction of the palette to black and white was a renunciation common to many artists in Europe and America in the 1940s and 1950s, including Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. Bold colors, as Mondrian's painting had shown, had specific spatial implications when painted in relation to one another. This was antithetical to the notion of the 'all-over' field, the crucial development of Abstract Expressionist painting, in which form and space, and therefore meaning, were in a constant state of flux. However, unlike de Kooning, whose reduction of color led to an exploration of form through line, Kline's strokes were more aggressive, open and monumental, seeking to define space and movement. In Sabro as in many of Kline's paintings, strong vertical and horizontal brushstrokes provide an architectonic structure that holds the composition together as dynamic diagonals rush across the surface.
'Bold, sooty, black brushstrokes traverse the large white canvases of Franz Kline like steel girders silhouetted against the New York sky. They are among the strongest and most important statements made by an artist during the exciting decade of the 1950s. So insistent is their image that the immediate impact is one of almost brutal spontaneous power. Later on the realization grows that careful structure and loving handling of the paint are paramount elements in their development. Enormous size, sheer inventiveness, paint and the appearance of paint being applied rapidly, almost violently, are important characteristics which contribute to the extraordinary force of these paintings' (J. Gordon, Franz Kline 1910-1962, New York 1968, p. 9).
Kline's method was to use six or eight-inch-wide housepainter's brushes on large scale canvases tacked directly to the wall--the solid support allowed him to push the heavily loaded brushes across the canvas with more force. The seeming simplicity and elegance of his compositions elicited comparisons to Asian calligraphic painting, a comparison which was not encouraged by Kline. He was quoted as saying, 'People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it, but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important' (I. Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, New York 1970, p. 245). Kline created definitive shapes with the white as well as the black. 'He cuts directly backwards and forwards between black and white to get a taut, continuous pictorial structure, improvised with a strong sense of equivalent paint areas. As he puts the black down, the need for white increases; as the white goes down, it pushes against the black, and so on...' (L. Alloway, "Sign and Surface (Notes on Black and White Paintings in New York)," Quadrum, 1960, vol. 9, p. 54). The 'backwards and forwards' of the application created a dynamic balance that is characteristic of the best Kline paintings, one that evokes a strong kinesthetic response in the viewer--an image of almost uncontainable vitality rooted in Kline's bold gestural handling of paint.
Franz Kline is viewed as the master of black and white Abstract Expressionist painting, using the two colors as counterpoints in compositions of gestural velocity. The reduction of the palette to black and white was a renunciation common to many artists in Europe and America in the 1940s and 1950s, including Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. Bold colors, as Mondrian's painting had shown, had specific spatial implications when painted in relation to one another. This was antithetical to the notion of the 'all-over' field, the crucial development of Abstract Expressionist painting, in which form and space, and therefore meaning, were in a constant state of flux. However, unlike de Kooning, whose reduction of color led to an exploration of form through line, Kline's strokes were more aggressive, open and monumental, seeking to define space and movement. In Sabro as in many of Kline's paintings, strong vertical and horizontal brushstrokes provide an architectonic structure that holds the composition together as dynamic diagonals rush across the surface.
'Bold, sooty, black brushstrokes traverse the large white canvases of Franz Kline like steel girders silhouetted against the New York sky. They are among the strongest and most important statements made by an artist during the exciting decade of the 1950s. So insistent is their image that the immediate impact is one of almost brutal spontaneous power. Later on the realization grows that careful structure and loving handling of the paint are paramount elements in their development. Enormous size, sheer inventiveness, paint and the appearance of paint being applied rapidly, almost violently, are important characteristics which contribute to the extraordinary force of these paintings' (J. Gordon, Franz Kline 1910-1962, New York 1968, p. 9).
Kline's method was to use six or eight-inch-wide housepainter's brushes on large scale canvases tacked directly to the wall--the solid support allowed him to push the heavily loaded brushes across the canvas with more force. The seeming simplicity and elegance of his compositions elicited comparisons to Asian calligraphic painting, a comparison which was not encouraged by Kline. He was quoted as saying, 'People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it, but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important' (I. Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, New York 1970, p. 245). Kline created definitive shapes with the white as well as the black. 'He cuts directly backwards and forwards between black and white to get a taut, continuous pictorial structure, improvised with a strong sense of equivalent paint areas. As he puts the black down, the need for white increases; as the white goes down, it pushes against the black, and so on...' (L. Alloway, "Sign and Surface (Notes on Black and White Paintings in New York)," Quadrum, 1960, vol. 9, p. 54). The 'backwards and forwards' of the application created a dynamic balance that is characteristic of the best Kline paintings, one that evokes a strong kinesthetic response in the viewer--an image of almost uncontainable vitality rooted in Kline's bold gestural handling of paint.