Franz Kline valuation
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.
What a work by Franz Kline is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 3 May 1910, Wilkes-Barre
- Died
- 3 May 1962, New York City
- Movements
- Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting
More on Wikipedia.
Egan, the colour, and the catalogue raisonné
Kline's first solo show, at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York in October 1950, was eleven black and white abstractions. Many titles name places and machines from the coal country of Pennsylvania where he grew up, though the pictures rarely resemble them. From 1958 he brought colour back into the work, and he died in New York in 1962, ten days before his fifty-second birthday.
A digital catalogue raisonné of the paintings from 1950 to 1962 was published in 2022, and a painting from those years should be found there, with its exhibition history and provenance.
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