The Man Who Painted IMPACT

By ROBERT HUGHES

EVEN AMONG FAMOUS ARTISTS there are degrees of neglect. Nobody could call the Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline overlooked. Not when his pictures have sold for a million dollars and up. Not with his signature style recognizable in an eye blink, the black girderlike slashes on the white ground. But compared with Jackson Pollock, who has been a household word -- well, in some households anyway -- for the past quarter-century, Kline is positively obscure. It's like comparing Sal Mineo with James Dean. Both were in the movie Rebel Without a Cause, but only one of them car-smashed his way into permanent Valhalla.

Kline died in 1961 at the early age of 51, and since then he has not turned out to be a darling of the museums and the art historians. The last full museum show of his work was back in 1985, and in Cincinnati, Ohio; it never came to New York City. So the present show at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, "Franz Kline: Black & White, 1950-1961," breaks an unwelcome silence on a strong, if admittedly somewhat limited, artist. It is really the black-and-white works that bear Kline's claim to importance; he was mainly an artist of impact, and when that kind of sensibility uses color, it tends to over- or underuse it, in either case stressing its declarative rather than its sensuous nature. But in monochrome he could really cook.

His early figurative work is not in the show, but it is worth remembering for its origins. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Kline had an entirely traditional training at the Art Students League in Boston, wanted to be an illustrator and studied for a time (1936-38) in London. He was imbued with the thick-massed but linear realism that came out of the Ashcan School and filled the cartoons that John Sloan and others did for periodicals like the New Masses. He doted on Krazy Kat (as did his friend Philip Guston) and the superstylish illustrations of John Held Jr. The black-and-white tradition was in his head, where it coexisted with a considerable range of other references.

People who knew him in the '40s and '50s remember that Kline liked to talk about Gericault and Velazquez, about old silver and 18th century political cartoons, rather than the gaseous rodomontade of "tragic chaos" and "existential risk" that got loaded onto Abstract Expressionism by such artists as Barnett Newman and such critics as Harold Rosenberg. In short, he was very interested in style, a suspect idea then but one that his paintings are none the worse for raising. We can't see Kline the way the art world did 40 years ago, when critics wrote about his "desperate shriek" or his "total and instantaneous conversion" to black and white. Ab Ex was less apocalyptic than its fans once thought, and Kline was not so at all.

His black-and-white style was a real invention, but its roots are not hard to see. If one was illustration, another was the black-and-white paintings of de Kooning in the late '40s. An early Kline like Ninth Street, 1951, with its traces of looping body shapes, makes that clear. Where it did not come from, though, was where it was often said to have come from: Oriental calligraphy. Of course, there is a superficial likeness between Kline's structures and ideograms in sumi ink on silk, especially in reproduction, when the particular qualities of paint and surface are lost. But the things themselves are very different. "People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black ! sign on it," protested Kline, "but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important." The black masses and bars aren't just gestures, they're forms; the white isn't an absence but a color.

Sometimes the speed of the brush is important -- it leaves frayed edges, something like the speed lines in cartoons, but in other paintings, like the impressive Wotan, 1950, nothing moves or is meant to. The big rectangle anchored by one edge to the top of the canvas has a massive presence and thickness of paint, and its blunt authority looks forward to what American minimalists would be doing a generation later, in the '60s.

All through this show one catches such premonitory notes, and one realizes what a big submerged effect Kline must have had on some of the better artists now alive: Richard Serra, for instance, whose dark walls of steel and thickly scrubbed-on black-crayon drawings evoke the same urban-industrial landscape that inspired Kline, or Brice Marden, or Cy Twombly, who lent this show a bunch of Kline's quickly brushed, frail sketches done on now crumbling pages of Manhattan telephone directories. These studies, not incidentally, dispose of the myth that Kline was a wholly spontaneous painter who staked everything on the one-shot gesture. He would make them, mull over them, choose one and then, just like a 19th century painter enlarging a drawing through a grid, project it from an epidiascope onto the big canvas. As David Anfam remarks in his catalog introduction, "Kline upsets the narrative that Abstract Expressionism invites."

The most perfectly realized painting in this show has to be White Forms, circa 1955; the balance between the rushing black and the captured density of the static white seems exact, perfect and yet imperiled by the energy of movement. Such structures have a lot to do with the way New York City and industrial America generally were described by photography. When Walker Evans looked at the Brooklyn Bridge or Margaret Bourke-White at the Hoover Dam, they saw hieroglyphs of power; so, moving through Manhattan, did Kline. The graininess and stark contrast of Robert Frank's photos in the '50s belong, as Anfam points out, to the same take on America as Kline's paintings -- a place of raw visual possibility, of collision of opposites and continuous flight.