Lot Essay
With their stark, angular scaffold-like silhouettes, Klein's black and white compositions are powerfully architectonic, and evoke associations with the urban landscape. Nevertheless, a sizeable category of these works are derived from the figure. The artist stated:
"Since 1949...I've been working mainly in black and white paint or ink on paper. Previous to this I planned painting compositions with brush and ink using figurative forms and actual objects with color. The first work in only black and white seemed related to figures, and I titled them as such. Later the results seemed to signify something --but difficult to give subject or name to, and at present I find it impossible to make a direct, verbal statement about the paintings in black and white." (quoted in J.I.H. Baur, The New Decade, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1955, p. 48).
A figural reference is overtly stated in the present work, a study for the oil painting Figure, 1956 (coll. De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts). While the figurative element in an artist such as DeKooning is a gestural response to an essentially surrealist tradition, as well as an intense emotional involvement with his subject, Kline's figure abstractions display little outward evidence of a Surrealist source, and his subject appears depersonalized to the extent that the viewer must supply much of the context for these works. For Henry F. Gaugh, Figure "conjures up totems attending some primordial rite." (op. cit; p. 107). Indeed, the imagery in his figural works is more of an expression of means rather than subject, that is, Kline's own preoccupation with drawing as an activity in itself. In their details, Kline's drawing is resolutely non-descriptive, and the sheer monumentality of his conceptions, even when seen in a small scale, compels the viewer to make his own associations. It is perhaps in their ambiguity, and the artist's refusal to specifically "name" his subject, that the enduring power and intensity of these works reside.
"Since 1949...I've been working mainly in black and white paint or ink on paper. Previous to this I planned painting compositions with brush and ink using figurative forms and actual objects with color. The first work in only black and white seemed related to figures, and I titled them as such. Later the results seemed to signify something --but difficult to give subject or name to, and at present I find it impossible to make a direct, verbal statement about the paintings in black and white." (quoted in J.I.H. Baur, The New Decade, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1955, p. 48).
A figural reference is overtly stated in the present work, a study for the oil painting Figure, 1956 (coll. De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts). While the figurative element in an artist such as DeKooning is a gestural response to an essentially surrealist tradition, as well as an intense emotional involvement with his subject, Kline's figure abstractions display little outward evidence of a Surrealist source, and his subject appears depersonalized to the extent that the viewer must supply much of the context for these works. For Henry F. Gaugh, Figure "conjures up totems attending some primordial rite." (op. cit; p. 107). Indeed, the imagery in his figural works is more of an expression of means rather than subject, that is, Kline's own preoccupation with drawing as an activity in itself. In their details, Kline's drawing is resolutely non-descriptive, and the sheer monumentality of his conceptions, even when seen in a small scale, compels the viewer to make his own associations. It is perhaps in their ambiguity, and the artist's refusal to specifically "name" his subject, that the enduring power and intensity of these works reside.