Painting: Painstaking Slapdash

“Hell, half the world wants to be like Thoreau at Walden,” Painter Franz Kline once remarked, “worrying about the noise of the traffic on the way to Boston. The other half use up their lives being part of that noise. I like the second half.” He painted the noise, in hurtling compositions that were apt to bear the names of locomotives or place-names of his native Pennsylvania coal country. Together with his fellow abstract expressionists, he split the Manhattan art world of the early 1950s into two camps. The conservatives damned them because their work not only obliterated the human image but looked slapdash, crude and unfinished. Nonsense, replied the avantgarde; those traits were inevitable if a modern painter was to record his own vision.

Traffic thunders on. When the Whitney Museum last week unveiled Manhattan’s first Kline retrospective since his death in 1962, the survivors from both camps were all but outnumbered by a newer generation of museumgoers. This generation grew up looking at abstract expressionism, and although it has no difficulty in accepting Kline’s premises, it has grown vastly more critical of his output. O.K., the newcomers say, strolling from picture to picture, we all know he was a landmark, a titan, a pioneer. But did he paint good abstractions or bad ones?

The current exhibition’s answer: Both. Throughout his career, Kline turned out both superb and atrocious works, and the 92 pictures on display include rather more than a fair share of failures. Paradoxically, the uneven quality may even enhance Kline’s reputation. Few artists could hope to survive such a warts-and-all survey. Yet undeniably the powerful radicalism of the mustachioed Pennsylvanian comes across—though sometimes as crude as corn whisky, and sometimes as bombastic as soapbox oratory.

Intricate Jumble. Kline’s early Greenwich Village scenes of the late 1930s and early 1940s were sturdily realistic. At the time, he was decorating the walls of the Bleecker Street Tavern with $5 murals, to make ends meet. His break into abstraction was sudden and dramatic. For years, he had been making increasingly simplified sketches; as an art student in London, he had also collected Japanese prints. One day in 1949, he was visiting a friend who had a Balopticon projector; they enlarged several Kline sketches on the wall. The blown-up image wrenched the drawings out of all relation to reality. Kline saw before him an abstract composition that he could develop.

Armed with house painter’s brushes and paints (he could afford no better), he labored with endless preliminary sketches and interminable revisions to build a series of carefully thought out, tense compositions. They were, of course, meant to look as though they had been stroked impetuously on the canvas in a matter of minutes. Said he: “The final test of a painting is: Does the painter’s emotion come across?” To be sure that his did, he left his painting surfaces an intricate jumble of spatters, strokes and corrections.

Flaming Boosters. What emotion did he seek to convey? That question he usually begged with a grin. In essence, Kline and his fellows were creating a new artistic language, through the push and pull of the images and the very strokes of the brush, to express emotions that could not be put into words. But, as Kline found himself becoming a success, the task became more difficult. He could now afford linen, instead of cotton, canvas and real artist’s pigments, but these, he found, produced a slickness that belied his deliberate crudeness. His compositions became larger and more complex. Unfortunately, they often ended up murky and inconclusive.

Hardest of all was the use of color. Sporadically, through the years, Kline tried and failed. Black and white, the nouns and verbs of his paintings, could talk to each other in a stately pidgin English, but colors, the adjectives and adverbs, often garbled the conversation to an incoherent babble. Only in his last years did Kline make color do his bidding. Orange and Black Wall, one of his later paintings, lunges upward and off the canvas like a giant rocket, rising up on the strength of its flaming boosters. Red Painting mounts an enigmatic black rectangle in a morning-red sky that endows it with a warning eloquence and precision.