Energy in Black and White

By ROBERT HUGHES

"Franz Kline: The Vital Gesture," which runs through March 2 at the Cincinnati Art Museum, is one of a lengthening list of distinguished exhibitions that will not be seen in New York City. No doubt, in one way, this only confirms that curators west of the Hudson can act without the writ of the Manhattan art world--no bad thing, considering some of the ways in which that writ has lately run. And yet for New York, it is a striking and rather ironic omission. Franz Kline (1910-62) is the only original member of the New York school whose work has never been given a retrospective by a Manhattan museum. That one should have to go to Cincinnati to see him is a thought that Kline, no mean humorist, might have relished.

For the past 25 years, a pyramid of hagiographic paper has been raised over the tomb of abstract expressionism. Its artists, we have been told ad nauseam, shifted the focus of modern art from Paris to New York; Moses-like, they led American art from provincial darkness into the radiance of history, opening nothing less than a new chapter in the epic of American self-esteem, and so on, and so forth. So much money and institutional clout have been poured into and around the pyramid that it now seems as fixed a historical construct as that of Cheops. Nevertheless, it has not commemorated all the artists equally. Kline is the proof.

One could certainly argue, on the evidence of this show, that Kline possessed neither the innovative powers of Jackson Pollock, nor the ramping, risky intensity of Willem de Kooning, nor the reflective pictorial intelligence that distinguishes the best work of Mark Rothko or Robert Motherwell. But he was still, when on form, a first-rate painter, well worth scholarly attention. So why have we seen so little of him? Because, it seems, the common curatorial view is that Kline was a backup man, not an innovator. This has chilled the interest of museums, if not the market. So, until a fuller retrospective comes along--this one consists of some 100 works and leaves out many of the significant ones--we can be grateful to Curator Harry Gaugh for both the show and the accompanying catalog, which is by far the best study yet made of this part-neglected, part-fetishized artist.

It was Kline's misfortune to die before he had worked out the big change of his mature style, from black and white to color. At the same time, there was never much interest in his early efforts. The paintings of industrial landscapes from his youth, city streets, bar scenes and alienated clowns (Nijinsky as Petrouchka, done from an old photograph, was a favorite image) were seen, if at all, as a mere prelude to his abstract work. They did not look as "interesting" as the early work of his colleagues because Kline was the only abstract expressionist not touched by surrealism. He painted as though he had never seen a Miro. And so Franz Josef Kline, named by his Pennsylvania saloonkeeper father after the Austrian Emperor, is mainly remembered for a decade's worth of paintings: the stark abstractions, composed of thick bars, props and vectors of black on a white ground, that he made in New York after 1950. Their iconic monochrome stamped itself on American cultural memory as vividly as Pollock's drip, Newman's zip, Rothko's blur or the shark smile of De Kooning's women.

It enraged Kline to hear, as he often did, that these works imitated Oriental calligraphy. The calligrapher's white paper is always neutral, a void, whereas Kline wanted his whites to be seen for what they were--blocks and patches of pigment, as painted as the blacks. Moreover, he disliked the word's pseudospiritual aura. Those black strokes were the residue of a tough, specific place, one to which David Smith's sculpture also appealed: a world of trestles and girders, piers and railbeds and X braces, of sooty industrial silhouettes and locomotives highballing through the lonesome American dark.

This retrospective shows, clearly enough, how such images wound into Kline's work from his roots in the coal country of eastern Pennsylvania, where he was raised by his stepfather, a foreman on the Lehigh Valley Railroad, after his father shot himself in 1917. There is a direct link between his early industrial landscapes of the '40s and a painting like Wotan, 1950, through the work of Kline's contemporaries--especially, in the '40s, De Kooning, whose influence on Kline was pervasive. A case can be made for Wotan as Kline's masterpiece; that extraordinarily forthright black rectangle, with a stub of the top "girder" sticking out to the right, is an image whose Wagnerian power fits its title. Majestic and a little slangy at the same time, it is one of the most commanding American paintings.

But by temperament Kline feared repetition, and at the start of the '60s he was seeking a way to get color back into his work. In fact, it had not entirely left; browns, vermilions and rust-reds are buried under the black girders of the '50s. Contrary to received opinion, Kline had a strong instinct for color, and by 1961 it was at full stretch in paintings like Andrus, with its slashing chords of violet, ultramarine and cadmium red. Andrus, which was in Kline's last show, was named after his cardiologist; in the spring of 1962 his rheumatic heart gave out. Thus what Kline might have done with color--like what Pollock would have produced in the return to figuration he had begun just before his death--can never be known.