F ranz Kline’s Study for Chief represents a quintessential embodiment of the commanding abstraction which define and distinguish the artist’s inimitable painterly oeuvre. Executed circa 1950, at the inception of Kline’s signature style, the present work brilliantly demonstrates his sophisticated brand of Action Painting, evoking the compositional equilibrium that has become an indelibly significant aspect of his artistic legacy. A draftsman to the core, Kline focused meticulously 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 plane. Through the boldly graphic swathes of crisp monochromes that delineate its surface, Study for Chief distills all the explosive force of Kline’s famed canvases into a gem-like scale. Indeed, the present work is a study for what is perhaps Kline’s most famous composition of all: Chief of 1950, now in the permanent collects ion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That canvas was admired by Alfred H. Barr, then-director of MoMA, and Dorothy Miller, senior curator of paintings, when it was exhibited at Kline’s first solo exhibition at the Egan Gallery in New York; as it was unlikely that the museum would be able to raise the funds, David M. Solinger interceded on the museum’s behalf, acquiring Chief and then donating it to MoMA in 1952. As thanks, Kline himself gifted the present study to Solinger, in whose collects ion it has remained ever since. The dynamic black and white elements of the present work vibrate with a visceral vitality that characterizes Kline’s unique ability to energize the most basic of chromatic components; emphatically fused into the muscular scaffolding of dramatic diagonals and abrupt loops which break the confines of its intimate scale, Study for Chief shows Kline’s paint-laden pictorial language at its most eloquent, fierce, and utterly profound.

Kline’s signature expressive brushstrokes and vigorous slashes often imply spontaneous, impulsive gestures, yet that was very seldom the case, as the consummate draftsman preferred to work from drawings and preparatory studies, like the present example. The titular subject of the present work, “Chief,” was the name of a locomotive Kline remembered passing through his childhood hometown in Pennsylvania. In keeping with his newly developed style, the composition is entirely non-figurative, and yet the pulsing forms seem to embody an expressive visual analog for the power and intensity of its subject. The broad strokes imply speed and strength as they rush off the edge of the page, swelling tautly into loops and curves as they go. At once rigorously architectural and unrestrainedly dynamic, Study for Chief invokes images of roaring automotive forces that, while resolutely abstract, articulate the artist’s fascination with the revolutionary industrial and urban forms of the modern age.

The tracery of broad strokes that demarcate the architectonic structure of the present work bespeaks not only the force of its subject, but also the intensity and muscular energy of Kline’s urban artistic environment. The fast-paced, brash city is a formative undercurrent to much of the Action Painting that established New York as the new center of the art world in the post-war years of the mid-Twentieth Century, and this propulsive atmosphere was deeply embedded in the energetic and symbiotic compositions that poured forth in the 1950s from the brushes of both Franz Kline and his friend, Willem de Kooning. Informed as it was by Kline’s immediate surroundings, the present work thrives in its celebration of the tactile presence of provocatively painted surfaces, with a dramatic tension between form and gesture, surface and volume, process and speed that was equal to the innovations of his fellow Abstract Expressionists at mid-century. As the semi-representational imagery of his earlier career was relinquished and the artist 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. Upon viewing the large canvas Chief at the Museum of Modern Art in 1952, art historian Irving Sandler felt moved and astonished by its unique potency: “The painting did not provide any particular pleasure or delight. Nor did I ‘understand’ it. I responded in another way—with my ‘gut,’ as it were. The painting had a sense of urgency and authenticity that gripped me… It was at once surprising, familiar, and imposing… Chief revealed to me the power of the visual in my being. It was like releasing the flood gates of seeing” (Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-Up after Artists, New York, 2004, p. 10). Deftly containing the same force and vigor within a single sheet, Study for Chief articulates the mastery of color and line that defines Kline’s inimitable painterly practice.

Artist

Franz Kline