Franz Kline, New York
Robert Frank American, born Switzerland
Not on view
Seated amid the bohemian effects of his 14th Street studio, Franz Kline (1910-1962) is pictured as the paradigm of the American artist-tough-minded, independent, and solitary. Frank must have sensed a kindred sensibility at work in Kline, whose speeding off-kilter brushstrokes and gritty black-and-white surfaces find a visual analogue in Frank's photographs. He has set Kline against an unstretched canvas tacked to the wall, cleverly embedding the persona of the artist in the work itself. In its unblinking directness, Frank's portrait of Kline embodies the postwar aesthetic credo that a work of art should truthfully record the psychological and phenomenological experience of its creation.
