Franz Kline

Franz Kline – Difficult childhood; studies in Boston and London

Franz Kline was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on 23 May 1910. Art hardly played a role in the rural, coal-mining environment. The family situation was also difficult: in 1917, the seven-year-old Franz Kline had to deal with his father’s suicide; his mother married a second time and sent her son to Girard College, a school for fatherless children. In retrospect, Kline only ever referred to this institution as an ‘orphanage’. He gathered his first artistic merits as a caricaturist for his high-school newspaper, before starting a course at the art school in Boston in 1931 where he met like-minded lecturers who introduced him to modern art. Kline spent a happy year in England: he met his later wife, the former ballet dancer Elizabeth V. Parsons, at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London, where she worked as a model and the pair moved to New York in 1938.

Large-format black and white paintings in the abstract style

There followed difficult years for Franz Kline in New York, professionally as well as privately, as his wife suffered from a psychological breakdown and spent a long time in sanatoriums, also putting a strain on the artist’s work. In particular, though, Kline had not yet found his own form of artistic expression and was forced to make a living with diverse odd jobs. His artistic development was decisively affected by his acquaintance with Willem de Kooning, who, along with Jackson Pollock, exerted the greatest influence on Kline’s understanding of painting. Kline distanced himself from figuration which he had hitherto cultivated in the style of American Realism with Cubist accents, and turned to abstract painting. His work was seen by art critics as toeing the threshold of minimalism, and he is also considered one of the pioneers of Action Painting. Kline is famous today for his characteristic large-format black and white paintings which experts still argue are inspired by Japanese calligraphy – something Kline himself has consistently denied. 

Pictures without meaning; international recognition

Franz Kline always avoided attributing a deeper meaning to his paintings; in contrast, there is an ongoing struggle for the proper understanding of his pictures. It was not until the autumn of his career that Kline turned to colour painting and tried to express his artistic ideas with colour. Yet Kline was never primarily concerned with conveying his own ideas, but always with a physically perceptible interaction with the viewer of his pictures. Franz Kline received prizes and awards for his work, took part in documenta II in Kassel in 1959, and his works were exhibited posthumously in documenta III in 1964. He inspired a whole generation of notable artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Aaron Siskind, Mark de Suvero and Cy Twombly. 

Franz Kline died on 13 May 1962 in New York.