I can't tell you, I was so excited to read in the SF Bay Guardian that the Paul Thiebaud Gallery was showing a set of paint sketches by Franz Kline. Oh my.
By far my favorite painter of the American mid-century scene, I am always happy to see his work, but here an opportunity to see something personal as well. Sketches are like that, personal, because they are the precursor to finished work, done behind closed doors in the intimate incubation of maybe.
The story is that Kline was stuck, trying to find the way to produce what he had in mind, sketching about. De Kooning said, Try this: take your sketches, project them on a wall, blow them up, see what that looks like. What they looked like was big and powerful; the lines had depth and impact; the brush strokes stood on their own as entities in themselves.
Entities in themselves.
The other story is that Wayne Thiebaud was visiting Kline in his studio. The studio floor was littered with pages out of the telephone book. Each page had a painted sketch. Kline said each was a study in preparation for a painting. Every painting was worked out before hand on these throw-away pages. Thiebaud asked if he could take some to show his students. Even though Kline thought it was wrong to teach art, he said, sure, only don't sell them.
This was instantly my favorite.
I know the phone book paper was cheap and handy, but it has an archival quality and invokes the combine/collage of the era. Nonetheless, the images pop right out of the print, they're such strong statements. Entities.
Seeing his sketches adds a completely new dimension to his paintings which are revealed to be built upon these fleeting expressions of momentary awareness. The paintings are not so much in the moment as built upon—like painting after a snapshot. The remarkable thing is that the paintings retain the expressive energy of the initial gesture, if not more so. When enlarged, the expression is distilled, refined, more powerful even. Like a full sentence. Or an edifice constructed from a few brief lines.
Kline in his 14th Street studio, 1961, by Fred McDarrah.
Further elucidation.
When I look out the window—I've always lived in the city—I don't see trees in bloom or mountain laurel. What I do see—or rather, not what I see but the feelings aroused in me by that looking—is what I paint.
Using expressive gestures, he paints feelings experienced while looking—or remembering, like this one called, Chief, the name of a locomotive remembered from his youth, which doesn't so much look like the thing, but the way it feels. This is really a high level of discrimination—of experience and expression.
I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important.
This seems very important to get. The white is as important as the black and is painted on too, not an absence of color.
And just because I can, let me add these two paintings. The first, Zinc Door, shows the beginnings of color. I like it, the force of the two squares and the blush of color above.
And this, a gouache and pastel sketch on paper, fantastic for it's messy urgency like writing something furiously in the night so as not to forget. These sketchy moments—capturing something elusive, a thought, a feeling—oh yes, don't forget—said in paint. Love it.
Photos courtesy of
City Review,
MOMA,
Stephen Foster Fine Arts,
Walker Art Center.
Thank you Johnny Ray Huston for the alert.
