Franz Kline

by Dore Ashton (Editor), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Editor), David Anfam (Editor)

This landmark exhibition catalog surveys the entire career of one of the last great painters of high modernism, Franz Kline. It features over 70 major works, including paintings, drawings, sketches, and documentary material. The works included have been selected from collections from around the world with the intent of showing all of Kline's achievements, from the early figurative oil paintings of the late 1930s and 1940s to his breakthroughs in Abstract Expressionism seen in a selection of his large-scale black-and-white works. This volume traces Kline's art from its beginnings to his last painting in 1961, just a few months before the artist's death.
Kline, along with Pollock and Motherwell, was at the center of Abstract Expressionism and "action painting" in the America. This volume demonstrates in the monumental canvases, as well as in his many small-scale sketches made on paper, newspaper, and even telephone book pages, how Kline embraces gesture, experience, and emotion with direct and raw energy.

Genres: Art

416 pages, Hardcover

First published December 14, 2004

About the author

Dore Ashton (1928, – January 30, 2017) was a writer, professor and critic of modern and contemporary art. She was the author or editor of more than thirty books on art.

Reviews

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite artists... It is amazing what the man could do with just black and white. The book provides biographical background, and insight into his work.