![]() ![]() Philip Guston and George McNeil remember how he liked to talk about Henry Patrick Raleigh whose illustrations had accompanied stories in the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines-and whom very few persons at the Cedar Bar had ever heard of: Yet Kline did not often discuss his own work. Kline had an inclusive knowledge of art and could talk eruditely about it at length if he wished. Willem de Kooning has recalled, “He was an Anglophile in a nice way.” He could juggle life until it came up fun. Parsons, a former ballet dancer who modeled in Frederick Whiting’s drawing class at Heatherley’s. ![]() While in London he met his wife-to-be, Elizabeth V. His mother, a native of Cornwall who had come to the United States when seventeen years old, encouraged him along these lines. He attended Heatherley’s Art School in London hoping to prepare fora career in illustration. He also bore an allegiance to England where he lived from September 1935 to February 1938. He was a confirmed New Yorker, but had roots that he never forgot in the gritty coal country of eastern Pennsylvania. He could play the dandy or the clown, act like Ted Lewis, Wallace Beery, or Mae West, talk about rugs, vintage cars, Géricault’s horses, baseball, and Baron Gros. He liked beer at the Cedar Bar and English tea in the studio. Like a slap on the back, a punch in the gut, or a no-holds-barred embrace, it goes for whomever dares face up to it. One of the enduring values of Kline’s abstraction is its open-armed amplitude. The fast legibility of images in fluctuating matte and shiny surfaces generates a kinetic sensation. His black and whites declare their tangibility. His art is unavoidably physical in impact. Within the humane context of Abstract Expressionism, now that a rudimentary historical perspective is possible, Kline emerges as the most efficient architect of painting produced by the New York School. Kline’s big black-and-white style has its heroic side, but it is intimate as well. Actually his mature abstractions are filled with subtleties, soft-spoken variations on the themes of passion, gentility, resignation, conflict, celebration, solitude, and many others, all eagedy romantic. Kline spent the rest of his life, a little more than ten years, developing, benefiting from, but also at times burdened by his irrevocable style, one too easily misinterpreted as blown-up Japanese calligraphy or a deafening series of pictorial thunderclaps. Kline in 1958 interview with Frank O’HaraįRANZ KLINE IS FOREVER IDENTIFIED with large black-and-white paintings, ominous but often amiable and tender, that revealed him to be a major Abstract Expressionist when first exhibited in a one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery late in 1950. To be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in. ![]()
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