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Lot Essay
In 1956, fresh from his critically acclaimed show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, Franz Kline began to expand his investigations into the expressive possibilities of color and texture within his predominately black-and-white oeuvre. For Kline, famed for his monumental canvases adorned with muscular swathes of monochromatic paint, the introduction of color was not so much a representational device, more a formal one, as noted by the critic Thomas Hess in a review in Art News, "The problem--which he has also attacked in a brilliant series of small oil-on-paper sketches--involves making the color count as color without turning the blacks and whites into absence of color. It entails finding a new way to calculate value--in every meaning of this term--to retain the qualities of passions, unity and complexity that make all Kline's pictures" (T. B. Hess, Art News, Spring 1956).
Painted in 1957, Lavender Rust is an important work on paper which contains not only Kline's signature broad swathes of black-and-white paint but also the splashes of color and chromatic interventions that were a central part of the artist's oeuvre during this important period. In this particular example, the dramatic intersections of reds, mauves and olive greens are further enhanced by Kline's use of collage-in which not only planes of color bisect but also the surface planes on which they sit-adding a dramatic sense of tension to the work. Collage had been an increasingly important part of Kline's work since 1947-48 when he began to investigate color's potential as participant rather than aide to abstraction not only by placing it amongst his tangle of jagged forms, but also by expressing it in collage form too. An indication of the importance attached to this particular work is the fact that it was placed on long term loan with the Museum of Modern Art in New York during the early 1960s, in addition to being included in major exhibitions of the artist's work during that period at major institutions across Europe including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Basel Kunsthalle and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
The vibrant sweeps of color that distinguish Lavender Rust clearly mark out Kline as one of the main proponents of American abstraction. His bold brushwork combined with a masterful sense of composition produced work that is dramatically energetic yet at the same time graceful and composed. Within the diaphanous layers of pigment lies a raw energy and expressiveness that is unique amongst his contemporaries and has identified Kline as one of the foremost artists of his generation, "To Kline, art meant power, power to move and to be moved. He is the Action Painter par excellence. He did not wish to be 'in' his painting, as Pollock did, but to create the event of his passage, at whatever intersection of space and time, through the world. Each painting is a complete and open declaration of feeling." (D. & C. Shapiro, Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, 1990, Cambridge and New York, p. 291).
Painted in 1957, Lavender Rust is an important work on paper which contains not only Kline's signature broad swathes of black-and-white paint but also the splashes of color and chromatic interventions that were a central part of the artist's oeuvre during this important period. In this particular example, the dramatic intersections of reds, mauves and olive greens are further enhanced by Kline's use of collage-in which not only planes of color bisect but also the surface planes on which they sit-adding a dramatic sense of tension to the work. Collage had been an increasingly important part of Kline's work since 1947-48 when he began to investigate color's potential as participant rather than aide to abstraction not only by placing it amongst his tangle of jagged forms, but also by expressing it in collage form too. An indication of the importance attached to this particular work is the fact that it was placed on long term loan with the Museum of Modern Art in New York during the early 1960s, in addition to being included in major exhibitions of the artist's work during that period at major institutions across Europe including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Basel Kunsthalle and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
The vibrant sweeps of color that distinguish Lavender Rust clearly mark out Kline as one of the main proponents of American abstraction. His bold brushwork combined with a masterful sense of composition produced work that is dramatically energetic yet at the same time graceful and composed. Within the diaphanous layers of pigment lies a raw energy and expressiveness that is unique amongst his contemporaries and has identified Kline as one of the foremost artists of his generation, "To Kline, art meant power, power to move and to be moved. He is the Action Painter par excellence. He did not wish to be 'in' his painting, as Pollock did, but to create the event of his passage, at whatever intersection of space and time, through the world. Each painting is a complete and open declaration of feeling." (D. & C. Shapiro, Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, 1990, Cambridge and New York, p. 291).