Franz Kline (1910-1962)

As its title suggests, Study for Buried Reds is a preliminary work that evolved into the painting Buried Reds of 1953. Consisting of thick swathes of blue-black pulled and twisted into a dark form against a soft cream background of the paper, this work articulates an energetic battle of form within the limited confines of a small space.
One of the most notable aspects of the work as Harry Gaugh has pointed out in his book on Kline, is that this work in blue-black over cream was translated in the final oil painting into black over orange and green. Both works are evidently ones in which Kline was thinking about color. As so often in his work however, ultimately Kline filled over much of the original color in the final painting with pulls of white so that the painting once again took on the familiar black and white of so much of his work. As he told Leo Steinberg before his 1956 show, "I'm always trying to bring color into my paintings, but it keeps slipping away and so here I am with another black show" (F. Kline quoted in H. Gaugh, Franz Kline New York, 1994, p. 132).

In this rare blue-black work Kline packs the slim rectangular sheet of paper with a powerful twisting form of deep intensity. Familiar in its duotone formal language, a vigorous energy of form is shown breathing life into the empty form of the paper sheet. The blue-black color lends the work a warmth of feeling, one that is often denied by the severity of Kline's more usual use of black, and renders this work both unique and complete in itself. This aspect of his preliminary works was evidently something Kline sought, often unsuccessfully, to translate into his larger, bolder and more expansive canvas works. The translation was often unsuccessful as the larger more self-evidently material works often took on their own life, and resorted to black and white. "It wasn't a question of deciding to do a black-and-white painting," Kline explained to David Sylvester, often "the original forms that finally came out in black and white were in color and then as time went on I painted them out and made them black and white. And then, when they got that way, I just liked them, you know. I mean there was that marvelous twenty-minute experience of thinking, well, all my life has been wasted, but this is marvelous, that sort of thing" (F. Kline, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2002, p. 61).

Pre-Lot Text

Important Drawings from the Collection of Duncan MacGuigan