Franz Kline

Published on the occasion of the retrospective organised for the twentieth anniversary of the Castello di Rivoli and edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, this is the most up-to-date monograph on Franz Kline (1910-1962), the great American master of Abstract Expressionism and a leading protagonist of twentieth-century art.
The book, which presents a broad and thorough panorama of Kline’s artistic journey, offers the reader more than one hundred pieces comprising relief works, paintings, drawings, sketches and documentary material from leading public and private collections throughout the world. The aim is to show the most important stages in Kline’s work: from early oil paintings dating from the end of the 1930s and through the 1940s, in which it is possible to see realist inspiration, to the decisive shift towards Abstract Expressionism, documented by a selection of large works in black and white and the final canvasses in which the artist returned to using colour.
“American, but steeped in European visual culture – writes Ida Gianelli – Kline shows us the development of pictorial language from figurative work that recalls even Rembrandt and other classical painters the artist directly became acquainted with through European museums, to an abstraction reduced to the primary relationship between the white of backgrounds built up by visible layering, and the black of signs that unfold on the surfaces, often in a decentralised position, peremptory in their constructive strength however non-axiomatic, within a language totally generated by rhythm.
This dramatic immediacy becomes the stylistic feature of the era, on both sides of the ocean, as is well known, and Kline’s intensity never faded, not even when colour returned to become protagonist of composition and the sign frayed, with almost chiaroscuro effects and spatial illusionism.
Kline, who was fifty-two years of age at the time of his untimely death in 1962, remains a fundamental reference point for all those who in that period re-examined pictorial language and directed it to express emotional values and to become a declaration of existential turmoil.”
With an introduction by Ida Gianelli, the book includes essays by Dore Ashton (Kline com’era e com’è), David Anfam (Franz Kline: il Giano dell’Espressionismo Astratto), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Considerazioni sulla pittura di Franz Kline: la (dis)organizzazione e la (de)centratura dell’emozione) and Allan Stone (Una nota su Franz Kline) followed by a series of conversations by/on Franz Kline, L’arte astratta nel mondo di oggi; Franz Kline l’indefesso: un artista senza metafisica (with Ivan C. Karp); Rivoluzione in pittura. Franz Kline (with Selden Rodman); L’artista è oggi pro o contro il passato? (with Thomas B. Hess); Franz Kline parla (with Frank O’Hara); Franz Kline (with Katherine Kuh); Franz Kline 1910-1962: un’intervista (with David Sylvester). These essays are followed by photographs and a list of the works, a chronology, an anthology and a select bibliography.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, contemporary art expert, is head curator at the Castello di Rivoli.


Rivoli, Castello
20 October 2004 – 31 January 2005