Franz Kline

Although Franz Kline is best known for the abstract paintings he created between 1949 and 1961, he began his career making figurative works, many of which contained Social Realist–inspired references to the concerns of the urban lower classes. In 1950, however, Kline showed a group of paintings at New York’s Egan Gallery that established him as one of the preeminent practitioners of Abstract Expressionism. Over the next twelve years he painted with large-scale gestural strokes, frequently using a limited palette of black and white paint, to create such vigorous works as Mahoning.

Despite its majestic dynamism, Mahoning was based on a small, quickly brushed ink study (also owned by the Whitney) that Kline had made several years earlier on a page from a telephone book. He carefully translated the drawing into a larger-scale painting with the aid of a Bell-Opticon projector, a magnification tool introduced to him by friend and fellow artist Willem de Kooning. As Kline noted: “Some of the pictures I work on a long time and . . . there are other pictures that come off right away. The immediacy can be accomplished in a picture that’s been worked on for a long time just as well as if it’s been done rapidly.” Although many critics compared these monochromatic works with the gestures of Eastern calligraphy, Kline insisted that he was not writing with paint, for he painted as much with white as with black. The tension between light and dark creates the monumental forces of dynamic movement and taut architectural structure that make Mahoning an emblematic work of action painting.