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Lot Essay
A thrilling conjunction of assertive, angular lines rendered in signature monochrome, Franz Kline’s Untitled offers an electric, ink interpretation of the artist’s unmistakable visual language. Snapping across the paper with a spidery grace, Kline’s strokes maintain a sense of motion, even as their rigid linearity seems to build forms of impressive architectural strength; thick lines, underpinned by a central, tree-like column, intersect the middle and upper regions of the paper, while thinner, looser tendrils of ink flicker around them.
Despite the apparent spontaneity and free-flowing emotional intensity of Kline’s brushwork, unlike many of his fellow Action Painters, Kline’s works were in fact, usually, extensively drafted, with the painter working closely from previous compositional drawings. Ink, with its deep black colouring and dynamic fluidity, served as a natural model for the artist’s explorations of the brushstroke—a means of generating and experimenting with line, before his later paintings applied a closer, more analytical rigour to his forms. Yet though Kline’s ink works do provide fascinating insight into his artistic process, at the same time they achieve their own aesthetic autonomy, standing free of his larger paintings as independent works in their own right. The vigorousness and power of Kline’s larger works is no less present in Untitled—indeed, that feeling is distilled or compressed into a compact nucleus of forms that bristles with a barely concealed energy, the paper humming with the electric flurry of Kline’s apparently impulsive, yet ultimately considered, structural brushwork.
Despite the apparent spontaneity and free-flowing emotional intensity of Kline’s brushwork, unlike many of his fellow Action Painters, Kline’s works were in fact, usually, extensively drafted, with the painter working closely from previous compositional drawings. Ink, with its deep black colouring and dynamic fluidity, served as a natural model for the artist’s explorations of the brushstroke—a means of generating and experimenting with line, before his later paintings applied a closer, more analytical rigour to his forms. Yet though Kline’s ink works do provide fascinating insight into his artistic process, at the same time they achieve their own aesthetic autonomy, standing free of his larger paintings as independent works in their own right. The vigorousness and power of Kline’s larger works is no less present in Untitled—indeed, that feeling is distilled or compressed into a compact nucleus of forms that bristles with a barely concealed energy, the paper humming with the electric flurry of Kline’s apparently impulsive, yet ultimately considered, structural brushwork.