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November 28, 2007
It still resonates, doesn't it, 50 years latter.
Franz Kline, Torches Mauve, 1960, Oil on canvas
Kline's work still has a dynamic, spontaneous and dramatic impact. We are confronted with starkly simple contrast of mostly abstract black-and-white planes and strokes. The wild beauty of the raw, coarse, elemental, and brutal splinters and vectors distinguishes Kline's pictures.
This abstract expresionist mood expressed itself in an aesthetic of crudeness. This aesthetic embraced the gritty, the rough, and the raw, and sometimes incorporated downright ugliness (e.g., the arts of graffiti and vulgar junk of the city etc)--hence the phrase "tangled shards of debris".
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Gary
the traditional understanding of abstraction expressionism of the New York School was the rejection of both social realism and geometric abstraction, two dominant strains in American art in the 1930s, and by their interest in aspects of European-based Cubism and Surrealism. For them, art was no longer about copying forms in nature but was the expression of intangible ideas and experiences.
For some artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, the subject of art was autobiographical and emerged from the sheer act of making a painting. For others, among them Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, the motivation was a search for the sublime. Yet for all, as Mark Rothko eloquently postulated, "art was not about an experience, but was itself the experience."