![]() ![]() Kline’s signature style of thick brushstrokes, applied with an unerring calculation cloaked as apparent spontaneity, betrays little sign of his more realistic and figurative paintings of the 1940s. The tracery of broad strokes that demarcate the architectonic structure of Elizabeth retell the narrative of its execution, as well as the speed and vigor of the artist’s practice. How endemic to his whole being those diagonal trajectories were can be gauged by the way he danced… He had an impulse to shoot out into space, to slam through a wilderness of black and white and reach a climax of total freedom… He dances as he paints, beating out an idiosyncratic rhythm over sustained periods, and then suddenly, and with élan, breaks the rhythm dramatically by shooting out one foot in a precipitous accent grave movement.” (Dore Ashton, “Kline as he was and as he is,” in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Ed., Franz Kline: 1910-1962, 2004, p. Those great diagonals he favored reflected his inner rhythms, his own way of vaulting into the grand spaces he envisioned. His emphasis on ‘feeling’ as the proper criterion for a painter was not casual. Dore Ashton remembered: “Every nerve was enlisted while he was at work. ![]() The phenomenal painting embodies the balletic precision of Kline’s painterly approach just as the picture recalls the movement of his dancer wife, Kline’s own studio process evoked the rhythmic motion inherent in his works. Kline’s autographic pictorial language was founded on the dynamic juxtaposition of the two essential and basic chromatic components that have come to describe his legacy, and Elizabeth, as an archetypal example of its creator’s enduring aesthetic influence, ultimately celebrates the inherent tension between these simultaneously interdependent and autonomous opposites. Famously included in Kline’s seminal 1961 one-man show at the Sidney Janis Gallery, this monolithic painting comprises a visceral onslaught of Kline’s inimitable aesthetic. ![]() Here, the kinetic gestures of Kline’s brush evoke a figure’s movement in space, which is further amplified with personal meaning by the artist’s invocation of Elizabeth’s short career as a ballet dancer.Ī draftsman to the core, Kline rigorously focused on structure, whether in the force of broad individual strokes or the refined balance of layering black over white or white over black, all within the confines of a single canvas such as Elizabeth. Elizabeth recalls the painter’s association between his abstract line and other, more figural expressions of artistic movement-titles of other paintings with such structural compositions pay homage to artists that Kline admired, such as dancers Nijinsky and Merce Cunningham, and jazz clarinetist Barney Bigard. As such, the painting is exemplary of the rich connotations inherent in the artist’s most renowned works, all rooted in the plasticity of the paint and the purity of his unadulterated coloristic counterpoints in conjunction with absolute subjectivity and personal experience. A stunning portrait of intimacy, Elizabeth is named for Kline’s wife, the ballet dancer Elizabeth Parsons, who, like the famous Russian dancer Nijinsky, suffered from schizophrenia. Elizabeth, painted in 1961, is brilliantly demonstrative of the artist’s sophisticated brand of Action Painting, evoking the compositional equilibrium that has become such an indelibly significant aspect of his artistic legacy through the vigorous swathes of rich black and crisp white that delineate its surface. It was with unparalleled gestural velocity and structural elegance that Kline executed a singular oeuvre of supremely powerful canvases rendered in the stark yet eloquent polarity of his favored bichromatic palette. As the semi-representational imagery of his earlier career was relinquished and Franz Kline liberated line from likeness, the forthright black geometry of his visual lexicon gained a strength and presence as individual and impactful as Pollock’s drip, Newman’s zip, and Rothko’s stacks of ethereal hues. ![]()
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