拍品專文
Franz Kline died in May 1962 just before his fifty-second birthday. He won a major prize at the Venice Biennale in 1960. His familiar style of dramatic black and white paintings had developed during the decade from relatively small gestural semi-abstractions to large scale powerful canvases whose forms were dynamic and forceful. James Schulyer wrote in 1968: "The painting is not a laborious contrivance aping energy as expressed at a significant moment..., both random energy and the energy of intention, in an inseparable contiguity. The painting is in essence...a continuum. It is also perpetual change" (J. Schuyer, "As American as Franz Kline," Art News, October 1968, p. 58).
Diamond was painted in 1960, the year in which Kline was reintroduced color into his work, where there "were dark greens and blues, purples and reds, hues that almost perversely darken rather than brighten the mood of his paintings" (R. Goldwater, Franz Kline 1910-1962, Marlborough Fine Art, New York 1967, p. 8). Diamond is underpainted in dark greens and blues, and overlaid by blacks infused with blues, pinks and purples. The black form pushes dramatically across the painting and is overlaid from the left by a strongly painted white, suggesting a massive vitality.
Kline was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylavania in an industrial coal mining area. Since the 1940s Kline had a romantic and nostalgic fondness for railways. Harry Gaugh suggests that the title of this painting refers to the Black Diamond diesel locomotive of the Lehigh Valley Railroad in Pennsylvania which ran from Jersey City to Buffalo. Kline had also entitled two paintings in the 1950s after the well-known trains, Chief and Cardinal. Kline had made a drawing of Black Diamond around 1950 from a postcard of the train which depicts it speeding diagonally across the valley (figure 1). He had also made a number of early landscapes of the Lehigh Valley, with similarly dramatic diagonal paint masses. Kline did not tend to make direct connections between his titles and the sources. Here he uses only the second half of the train's name, suggesting but not enforcing the connection.
Robert Goldwater wrote in 1967: "It is a confirmation entirely visual in its immediacy, so strong as to be all-absorbing and creating so overwhelming a dialogue between work and spectator as at first to permit no thought of method. The concern for process, that supposed medium of the immediate, comes only much later, ironically introduced by its enemy, contemplation. In the first impact, and for sometime after (and perhaps finally) it is only the unanalyzed result that matters" (R. Goldwater, "Franz Kline: Darkness Visible," Art News 66, March 1967, p. 38).
(figure 1): Drawing and postcard of the Black Diamond train (circa 1949-1950)
(Private collection, United States)
Diamond was painted in 1960, the year in which Kline was reintroduced color into his work, where there "were dark greens and blues, purples and reds, hues that almost perversely darken rather than brighten the mood of his paintings" (R. Goldwater, Franz Kline 1910-1962, Marlborough Fine Art, New York 1967, p. 8). Diamond is underpainted in dark greens and blues, and overlaid by blacks infused with blues, pinks and purples. The black form pushes dramatically across the painting and is overlaid from the left by a strongly painted white, suggesting a massive vitality.
Kline was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylavania in an industrial coal mining area. Since the 1940s Kline had a romantic and nostalgic fondness for railways. Harry Gaugh suggests that the title of this painting refers to the Black Diamond diesel locomotive of the Lehigh Valley Railroad in Pennsylvania which ran from Jersey City to Buffalo. Kline had also entitled two paintings in the 1950s after the well-known trains, Chief and Cardinal. Kline had made a drawing of Black Diamond around 1950 from a postcard of the train which depicts it speeding diagonally across the valley (figure 1). He had also made a number of early landscapes of the Lehigh Valley, with similarly dramatic diagonal paint masses. Kline did not tend to make direct connections between his titles and the sources. Here he uses only the second half of the train's name, suggesting but not enforcing the connection.
Robert Goldwater wrote in 1967: "It is a confirmation entirely visual in its immediacy, so strong as to be all-absorbing and creating so overwhelming a dialogue between work and spectator as at first to permit no thought of method. The concern for process, that supposed medium of the immediate, comes only much later, ironically introduced by its enemy, contemplation. In the first impact, and for sometime after (and perhaps finally) it is only the unanalyzed result that matters" (R. Goldwater, "Franz Kline: Darkness Visible," Art News 66, March 1967, p. 38).
(figure 1): Drawing and postcard of the Black Diamond train (circa 1949-1950)
(Private collection, United States)