Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Franz Kline

A novelist, who had done his time in the screenplay salt mines of Hollywood, was asked once to define the difference between novel writing and script writing. The answer came in the form of this useful analogy: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a screenplay is like swimming in a swimming pool. The comparison is worth bearing in mind whenever one has to distinguish between radically different forms of activity within the same art form. Different satisfactions are in play, different resources are drawn upon and, it has to be said, one activity is going to be more rewarding than the other.

The analogy is particularly germane, it seems to me, when one comes to analysing the respective merits of figurative and non-figurative painting. I want to concentrate, as far as the last category is concerned, on what one might call pure abstract art, namely one where all attempt at representation has been eschewed, where, in the terms of one definition, “neither the work itself, or any of its parts represents nor symbolises objects in the visible world.”

It is worth raking over the coals of this debate as one of the great exemplars of this form of abstraction has just had a major exhibition in London. Franz Kline and the loosely associated members of the New York School (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Clifford Still, Barnett Newman and others) initiated what one might call the second great wave of abstract painting in the late 1940s and 1950s (I am taking the work of Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter group to be the groundbreakers in pure abstract painting, a trend that culminated in Mondrian’s primary-coloured grid paintings in the late 1930s). However, nothing in this corner of European modernism matched the brouhaha that erupted in New York with the advent of Abstract Expressionism. “The death of figuration” was loudly bruited about by both artists and critics, such was the influence and excitement generated by this group of painters.

Today, contemplating the pronouncements issued at the time, and the extravagant claims made for the artists themselves, a curious, not to say incredulous, distancing takes place. Can people really have believed that the arrival on the scene of Kline, Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Mother-well and the others signalled a watershed of such magnitude in the history of art? What does it say, half a century on from those days, about the kinds of critical judgement on offer? Can we really blame it all on Clement Greenberg?

As the twentieth century draws to its close, one of the most intriguing intellectual exercises will be the retrospective reassessment of “Modernism” (by which I mean that generation of revolution against formal traditions in all the arts that started, one might claim, with Schoenberg’s D minor quartet in 1905 and Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, and ended, let’s say, with the publication of Finnegans Wake and the outbreak of World War II in 1939). As time relentlessly intercedes between then and now, it will be all the easier to chart Modernism’s rise and fall, and analyse its application and transmogrification in the art forms of this particular 100 years. And it will be seen — it is already evident — that the archetypal, fundamental characteristics of the seven arts have absorbed and adapted themselves both to the serious currents of theory and innovation and also to the countless bouleversements of taste and wilful modishness that have swirled busily around them. Like mountains they are eroded somewhat, somewhat altered here and there, some cliff faces are more seamed and haggard, in some places the tree line has advanced or receded, but their elemental character remains the same. They have not, to extend the metaphor, suddenly become ox-bow lakes, or salt flats: for all the upheavals of their recent history they resolutely remain mountains. The novel, for example, has taken on board the lessons of Proust and Joyce, has filleted what little it likes from Virginia Woolf and decided to spit out much of what, say, B. S. Johnson and Alain Robbe-Grillet served up. Similarly with the theatre and the cinema — our diet is not pure Beckett and Brecht or Jean-Luc Godard and Ozu. Dance and music, too, have recognized where the culs-de-sac lie and have changed and reflected the upheavals in taste and aesthetics that have come and gone. One would like to say the same about painting and sculpture, and to a significant degree that is the case: the necessary lessons of the Modernist generation have been learned and have been exploited by most of our great artists. But to another, more worrying, extent it often seems to me that many artists — and critics and curators and dealers — still behave as if the Modernist iconoclasms of the 1920s and 1930s are as valid as they ever were. Here and there in the art world people still seem possessed of the desire to épater les bourgeois (as if they haven’t been thoroughly routed), to be outrageous, to break the mould, to “push the envelope,” as they say in Hollywood, as if this were something new, as if it hadn’t already been done for us before, many many times. In some areas Art at the end of the twentieth century — and this is not meant to be glib — seems the only art form that has not learned the lessons that the beginning of the century provided. It has not outgrown Modernism. It has not, in other words, grown up.

Franz Kline was a modestly talented American artist, born in Pennsylvania in 1910, who up until the late 1940s was painting figuratively in a style of sombre neo-Impressionism. There is some dispute about the source of the influence that caused him to turn so dramatically to abstract painting (possibly de Kooning’s black and white abstracts of 1948, possibly Arshile Gorky’s work), but whatever it was the change in artistic direction was marked and memorable. The first indications of the new style occur in the late forties in a series of small ink on paper sketches, clearly done almost spontaneously, in a manner of slashed doodling, sometimes one or two strokes of the brush, sometimes more squiggly and cursive. The key word often employed here is “gestural,” and it is by and large apt, suggesting as it does the vague arm movements one might make in conversation, the way one might render visually with one’s hands the random geometry of a car crash. Kline’s early black and white sketches reproduce this sparse but effective vocabulary. If a spread palm-down hand juddering through the air delineates succinctly the idea of a car skidding to a halt, then the smear and spotting of ink on paper also has a stylistic validity: one is conjuring up, suggesting, implying — in the same way as a raised fist implies a more complicated act of violence.

But — and there is always a “but” with Kline, as there is with all the Abstract Expressionists — Kline’s work is both enhanced and betrayed by reproduction. On the page an 11 × 8 inch sketch such as Study for Buried Reds can assume the massive gravitas of Four Square, which is 6½ × 4½ feet. In the museum, however, a collection of sketches known as the “Telephone Page Series” turns out to be less than nugatory. Loose watery bands of black ink on torn out, yellowing pages of Manhattan’s telephone directory, they are nothing more than a tribute to the framer’s art. They are certainly beautifully framed.

Kline’s work needs the large scale in order for it to function in its singular, solid, charged way. Even medium-sized canvases such as Third Avenue don’t deliver the visual impact that the big pictures do, even though the ingredients and the manner of their execution are virtually identical. I don’t want to suggest that Kline’s work only succeeds by virtue of what one might term the skyscraper effect (a skyscraper is the same shape as an upended match box — which is the more impressive?), as there are other forces operating in addition to sheer size and graphic shock value, but I think that the disappointment, the banality, of the smaller work is due to the fact that the brushstroking is too evident. Too evident and too simple. The aleatoric dominates: one begins to think of the arrangement of volumes, of the painting’s design, as merely serendipitous rather than consciously artistic. In a huge painting like Wanamaker Block, although the effect is of, let’s say, a dozen great slashes on the canvas with a loaded housepainter’s brush, there must in fact have been carefully considered dozens more. The big canvases are more worked, in other words, the black derives its density from more thoughtful application than a simple backhand sweep or haphazard doodle. And so is the white, too. One of the pleasant revelations of the Kline show is to observe how different the whites can be: sometimes a thick impasto, or sometimes a watery shading with the canvas showing through. There is a distinct textural quality to a successful Kline that reproduction again does not convey.

One is searching for instances of the painterly in work that seems deliberately to shun such values. But it is significant that the black and white pictures are not simply a stark contrasting of opposites. The painterliness is again more evident when Kline begins to introduce small notes of colour. In pictures such as To Win or Lehigh V Span, the note of purply maroon in the former and small streaks of blue and pistachio green in the latter function ideally with the dominant black and white — minor chords that set off the major themes. Curiously — or perhaps significantly — the less monochrome the pictures become, the more Kline’s palette enlarges, the less memorable and effective they are. Kline’s large colour pictures — exactly as “gestural” and fervid as the black and white — seem mere angry discordancies. Pictures such as Yellow, Orange and Purple or Head for Saturn seem strangely un-Klinean, routine Abstract Expressionism exploiting some vague idea of energy or rage. Kline is a victim of his own success, a fate that often befalls abstract painters. Once your style is established and recognized (better still: if it can be recognized at fifty yards), then it is very hard to make a change. Kline’s black and white paintings are as much a signature of the New York School as Pollock’s luminous dribblings. Kline is not about colour in the same way that Pollock is not about draughtsmanship. To put it cruelly, they had both found their “gimmick” and that was what the world wanted of them.

Kline died in 1962, aged fifty-one, of a heart attack, having wilfully, perhaps deliberately, ignored doctors’ warnings to cut down his potent appetite for nicotine and alcohol. He was concentrating on colour in the last year or so of his life, wanting colour, as he phrased it, to behave structurally like black and white. It was a new direction, but, on the evidence of the works left behind, it might not have proved a fecund one. It is a measure of Kline’s gift, his singular talent, that with such a reduced vocabulary — black and white, the ragged brushstroke, and the limits these factors impose on form and composition — he was able to produce abstract paintings that are so memorable. (I was about to say “haunt,” but I feel that is a misnomer: let us say that some of Kline’s big simple paintings stay doggedly in the mind.) I think particularly of Thorpe, Yellow Square, Lehigh V Span, Wanamaker Block, Accent Grave and, to my mind his best painting, Hazelton.

What is it about Hazelton that makes it worthy of this distinction? It is large (41 × 78 inches) and the characteristic beamy slabs of black are painted with unusual confidence. There is less blurriness on the edges, less evidence of second thoughts or soft options, the black and white contrast is more austere, denser. It is also weighted heavily towards the right side, the volumes of black congregating in one half of the picture. One automatically scans a picture left to right, as one reads a book, the eye instinctively moves rightwards, and the massiness of the swathes of black in the right-hand segment seems gravid and packed, in powerful opposition to the two big white planes of the left-hand side, which are marred only by three or four tiny flecks. The flecks inevitably give a sense of scale, albeit arbitrary, small and scratchy beside the huge horizontal bar and the great tapered columnar vertical that almost divides the painting in half. There is an inevitable sense, too, of a horizon — a feeling that the top left rectangle of the picture recedes, is unpenned by the edge of the canvas.

Further comment becomes more subjective. The title of the painting suggests a place, the idea of a place implies a landscape, and one starts to imbue this dispersal of black and white pigment with attributes from our human world. Factors like “winter,” “woods,” “snowfields,” “sky” intrude, possibly all quite wrongly, as Kline claimed only to add his titles after the picture was painted as a means of identifying them, of distinguishing them from the mass of Untitleds that confuse critics and perplex curators. I feel this explanation is somewhat disingenuous as there is no doubt that calling a picture Wotan rather than Untitled 1957 inevitably adds something to the totality of response to that picture. Like it or not, one’s reaction to an abstract painting is always bound up with one’s human nature; it is virtually impossible (outside of an academic exercise) to confine it to the three essential judgements on colour, form and composition. People, human beings, who like art bring a whole complexity of sentiments — hard and soft, positive and negative — to the study of paint on canvas. By calling his picture Hazelton Kline slyly taps into that infinitely variegated richness, and thereby adds something to the picture’s greatness. It is naive, not to say dishonest, to pretend that it doesn’t matter.

I use the word “greatness,” but I use it advisedly. Much as I like and admire Franz Kline’s work, I would never use the word “masterpiece” about any of his paintings. Indeed I would never use the word about any purely abstract painting. This is what baffles and frustrates me about abstract painting in general, and not just the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School. When I consider the abstract paintings that I possess (by William Scott, Keith Vaughan, Sandra Blow and John Hoyland) and consider the pleasure I derive from them, it is of exactly the same order as my response to Franz Kline’s best work. Yet for all the pleasure taken, there is something lacking, something fundamentally indifferent. Pure abstraction, in denying the human context, denies itself true greatness.

Two factors lead me towards this conclusion, and the presence of both of them is essential if a painting is to be deemed “great” or the artist acclaimed as a “master.” In 1928 Paul Valéry reviewed a book on Veronese’s frescoes, during which he bemoaned the quality and calibre of the art of his time (this in 1928! One wonders how he would have felt today). He further commented that it was taken for granted in Veronese’s time that there would be in any artist

a combination of ability and technique, that is currently extremely rare: it was assumed that any artist was in full command of the science of his art to a degree that it was second nature. The utmost virtuosity [in the practising of his art] was absolutely indispensable.

This is a working definition of an artist — an artist of stature — that seems to me to be timelessly valid. Would we rather require that an artist have only a partial knowledge of the science of his art and be fair to middling in the practice of it? Franz Kline could draw passably well, certainly considerably better than Jackson Pollock, or Mark Rothko, which is a plus, but the “utmost virtuosity” was probably far beyond his reach. It may be argued that by the different standards of Abstract Expressionism Kline was indeed in full command of the science of his art, but there is still the second factor to be considered before we crown him with laurels.

I want to borrow and somewhat adapt a theory put forward by Richard Wollheim in the conclusion to his wise and remarkable book Painting as an Art. There, he offers an evolutionary argument for the objective intelligibility of painting. He argues that painting is intelligible — that painting conveys meaning — simply and precisely because it has survived over the centuries as an art in human societies. If it did not “work,” in other words, it would not have survived in these societies—“societies in which a common human nature manifests itself.” In my opinion, an art of pure abstraction reduces our ability to see our common human nature in the work of art. (Wollheim would not agree with me: he considers, for example, some late, purely abstract de Koonings as masterpieces. We part company here.) I am not saying that our common human nature is absent or degraded, I am merely saying it is much reduced and severely simplified and, in so far as this is the case, purely abstract art cannot function as art of the highest level and greatest profundity. I feel this when I confront the work of Franz Kline, and it prompts me to ask the old question: why swim in a swimming pool when you can swim in the sea?

1994