{"id":354,"date":"2009-03-23T22:46:26","date_gmt":"2009-03-24T05:46:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp\/2009\/03\/franz_klines_urban_scaffolding\/"},"modified":"2009-03-23T22:46:26","modified_gmt":"2009-03-24T05:46:26","slug":"franz_klines_urban_scaffolding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/2009\/03\/franz_klines_urban_scaffolding.html","title":{"rendered":"Franz Kline’s urban scaffolding"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nearly half a century after his death, Franz Kline still passes as an abstract painter. His breakthrough was a rejection of the worn-out world of surface representations. Beneath surfaces, he found good bones that he articulated as slashing diagonals, made either in black house paint loaded onto a broad brush and applied with the whole arm or condensed into smaller spaces in ink on paper.<\/p>\n

In a 2002 review<\/a>, Holland Cotter described Kline’s “fascination with radical forms of East Asian calligraphy,” citing a drawing from 1955 that “has the explosive look of Zen thrown-ink painting.”<\/p>\n

Kline was no Zen priest, however. His achievement is the appearance of spontaneity without the fact of it.<\/p>\n

The recent photographs of N. P. Thompson<\/a> offer evidence of what many have suspected, that instead of being purely abstract, Kline was painting the urban scene, specifically the scaffolding of tall buildings under construction. <\/p>\n

Here’s a Thompson photo, titled Intricacies<\/i><\/a>.
\nAnd here’s Kline’s small ink-on-paper, <\/em><\/span><\/font>Untitled (Study for Wanamaker Block)<\/em> from 1955, image from Stephen Foster Fine Arts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/font>\"wanamaker-study-300.jpg\"<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nearly half a century after his death, Franz Kline still passes as an abstract painter. His breakthrough was a rejection of the worn-out world of surface representations. Beneath surfaces, he found good bones that he articulated as slashing diagonals, made either in black house paint loaded onto a broad brush and applied with the whole […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-354","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}