Page 61 - Studio Interantional - May 1967

NEW YORK flagging ardour that stands as a positive value a condition of exciting paradox. Everything is
under any circumstances.
brought up close. It is all immediate and breath-
commentary by Dore Ashton It does take a certain amount of psychological taking. And yet, it speaks of an apprehension of
adjustment to cope with an oeuvre that has tremen- vastness that could never be called intimate.
dous unevenesses ; a style in which aspiration In those days that Kline was working at his
Franz Kline at Marlborough-Gerson; counts for more than final product, in which a large optimum, it was common for painters to speak
Sam Francis at Pierre Matisse; Morris degree of einfuhlung is demanded of the viewer. The about a canvas as coming off, or not coming off.
Louis at Andre Emmerich; Ellsworth Kelly fact is that Kline's gusto reveals itself not in his In his case there were a fair amount of paintings
at Sidney Janis; John Ferren at Rose Fried; methods of painting (most of us who knew him that didn't come off, as he himself was the first to
José de Rivera and Roy Gussow at Grace understand how painstakingly those seemingly point out. Clearly, where there is a possibility of
Borgenicht. spontaneous sprints into space were executed), but a painting's 'not coming off', there is a prior
in his spirited address to the expression of an consideration: that the painting fully mirrors the
almost inexpressible feeling about spaces. sentiment that inspired it. For Kline, it was not a
I realize that the discussion of space has become a matter of changing the direction of a vertiginously-
rather tedious academic pursuit, but there is no plunging line in order to make a more congenial
other way to deal with Kline. It is perfectly obvious composition; it was only in order to match the
in this exhibition of work covering his mature authenticity of the feeling which inspired the
decade, 1951-61, that Kline was especially sensi- painting in the first place. To the degree that this
tive to a certain exhilarating liberation of senti- is sensed in the painting, Kline epitomizes the
ment at the mere evocation of boundless spaces. so-called abstract expressionist aesthetic.
The five years since Franz Kline's death have put His thrill before the prospect of a horizontal, In this context it is positively refreshing to see in
so much distance between the particular climate stetching far beyond the limits of his vision, is one of the last paintings, for instance, that a kind
in which he worked and the conditions of aesthetic characterized again and again in his paintings. of clumsy, scumbled detail within a white mass—a
survival today that many attended the large It may have been inevitable, but it also may have technical sloppiness that few Europeans, for in-
exhibition at MARLBOROUGH-GERSON GALLERY with been his good fortune that he lived during a stance, could have brought themselves to tolerate—
some trepidation. How would Kline look in the period when sacrifices of conventions were gaily is an indispensable cue to the complexity of the
midst of the world today, thronged as it is with undertaken—in any case, Kline's sacrifice of all whole structure. Or, in another late painting,
smooth, cool, elegant, detached, and always just- but blacks, whites, and carefully-graded inter- Riverbed, it is startling to detect an awkward, tilted
right canvases? mediaries, facilitated the expression of his peculiar U-shape within the horizontal black mass, which
I don't think I'm alone in feeling that Kline passion. In streaking across his canvas with a broad seems to discharge a black gush into the wilderness
looks as though he will survive the passage of swath of black, and in choosing a small casually- of white. That extra detail, distinguishable because
many 'isms', for his own swift passage into a suggested appendage to achieve monumental of both the profile of the strokes and a slightly
unique idiom was marked throughout by an un- scale, Kline brought himself and his viewers into glossy surface, is an ingratiating and necessary

Franz Kline
Bruho 1961
Oil on canvas
37 x 52 in.