Franz Kline
Black bars across white canvas, painted with a decorator's brush and a great deal of thought.
Franz Kline was born at Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania in 1910, trained in Boston and in London, and painted realist city scenes for years before the change that defines him. In 1948, on Willem de Kooning's suggestion, he projected a small brush drawing onto the studio wall with a Bell-Opticon and saw the enlarged marks as pictures in themselves. The black and white paintings that followed are made with commercial enamel and housepainter's brushes on canvas, at architectural scale — and the white is painted as deliberately as the black, so they are not drawings enlarged but structures built. He died in 1962, at fifty-one.
Paintings are unique and the black and white works of the 1950s are the centre of the market, with the colour paintings of the last years a distinct and smaller group. The commercial enamels he used have not aged uniformly and yellowing of the whites is common and often original rather than a varnish issue, which is a distinction restorers and vendors do not always draw carefully. Many works are on paper, and he frequently painted on telephone directory pages and newsprint, which brings its own condition problems. Signature is usually on the reverse.
If you own a work by Franz Kline
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.