“When I look out the window – I’ve always lived in the city – I don’t see trees in bloom or mountain laurel. What I do see – or rather, not what I see but the feelings aroused in me by that looking – is what I paint."
Exhibiting a vigorous composition and striking array of color, Franz Kline’s Blue Center of 1958 is imbued with an energy and vibrancy characterizing his renowned artistic style. A commanding composition from one of the leading Abstract Expressionists, Blue Center is emblematic of Kline’s signature brand of painterly abstraction, and dates to a distinctly visionary period of his oeuvre during which the artist radically re-introduced color into his traditionally black and white compositions. By that t.mes a well-known figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement and among the most celebrated living painters, Franz Kline’s pivotal shift towards color in 1956 brought an entirely new dimension to his work, enlivening and animating his abstract compositions. Emerging from a smaller group within Kline’s larger body of work, these colored abstractions were heavily exhibited in the years following their creation, including solo exhibitions at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1960 and 1964, and the present work was chosen for inclusion in Henry Geldzahler’s legendary exhibition New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969. Blue Center epitomizes the power and sophistication of Kline’s emotionally rich style, and is furthermore remarkable for its exquisite provenance, having resided in the prominent collects ion of Robert Scull before entering the Alden collects ion in 1986.
In Blue Center, Kline utilizes broad swathes of white, negative space to frame a radiant heart of cobalt, while sweeps of black and vibrant magenta cut across the corners of the blue mass like scaffolding. These sharp, overlapping linear strokes strive to contain the charged blue hues at the heart of the composition, where gestural forms organize themselves into a densely packed frame of color and movement. The deep purple hues serve to deepen the composition against the lighter electric tones of the blue center, grounding the composition and allowing for expressive ribbons of emerald green, pale pink, bright yellow and creamy white that move freely throughout the rest of the canvas. The active painterly marks and impasto strokes are restrained onto a smaller canvas in Blue Center, allowing the present work to stay emblematic of Kline’s established gestural mode on an intimate scale.
"Though some people say that black and white is color, for me color is completely different. In other words, an area of strong blue or the interrelationship of two different colors is not the same thing as black and white. In using color, I never feel I want to add to or decorate a black and white painting. I simply want to feel free to work both ways.”
A pioneer of Abstract Expressionism and prominent.mes mber of the renowned artist collects ive, the “New York School,” of the 40’s and 50’s, Kline’s work established a signature visual idiom marked by varied, dominant strokes imbued with exceptional energy and spontaneity. Kline’s interest in structure and composition was originally born out of more traditional illustrations of landscapes and cityscapes, capturing the industrialized forms of his New York surroundings. A draftsman at heart, Kline rigorously focused on structure, whether in the force of broad individual strokes or the refined balance of layering various strata of paint atop one another, all within the confines of a single canvas. The fast-paced, brash city is a formative undercurrent in much of the Action Painting that established New York as the new center of the art world in the post-war years, and this propulsive atmosphere was deeply embedded in Kline’s energetic and symbiotic compositions. As Kline described in an interview with Selden Rodman for his 1979 exhibition, The Color Abstractions, “When I look out the window – I’ve always lived in the city – I don’t see trees in bloom or mountain laurel. What I do see – or rather, not what I see but the feelings aroused in me by that looking – is what I paint.” (Franz Kline quoted in: Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., The Phillips collects ion (and travelling), Franz Kline: The Color Abstractions, 1979, p. 16)
This initial exploration of structure within Kline’s oeuvre is largely explored through minimal to no use of color, with Kline’s practice in active, gestural modes honed through shape and form alone. In his black and white paintings, Kline used the calligraphic and geometric framework of verticals and horizontals to create a rectangular body on which to construct his compositions. The introduction of color to his work, therefore, was a massive undertaking for the artist, and opened infinite possibilities with which to take the energetic depth of his work to the next level. Trepidatious to dive into color altogether, Kline moved gradually out of his monochrome, black and white palette, taking a small step with the introduction of gray tones, or simply using one color at a t.mes , before eventually incorporating a broad spectrum of color into his body of work by 1958. In an interview with Katherine Kuh in 1961, Kline describes his inevitable destination in colorized compositions: “Then I started with only color, white and no black—then color and black and white. I’m not necessarily after the same thing with these different combinations, for, though some people say that black and white is color, for me color is completely different. In other words, an area of strong blue or the interrelationship of two different colors is not the same thing as black and white. In using color, I never feel I want to add to or decorate a black and white painting. I simply want to feel free to work both ways.” (Katherine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York and Evanston, 1962, p. 152) In Blue Center, we witness Kline’s newly won freedom to create a structural core from the potency of color as form, embracing both an array of saturated hues and traces of black and white from which his initial practices were honed.
