![]() Flanders thus refers both metaphorically and figuratively to the infrastructure of the city, as the framework of horizontals and verticals create at once a scaffolding to support the power of Kline’s paintbrush and a bustling intersection of painterly bravura. 16) Like de Kooning’s 1955 painting Interchange, Flanders is infused with a vitality that implies the rhythms of the streets of cosmopolitan life the dramatically angular arrangement of the present work, with the central upward vertical surge of pigment bisected and interrupted by an equally dominant horizontal, is redolent of the grid-like urban landscape of New York City. Cat., Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection (and travelling), Franz Kline: The Color Abstractions, 1979, p. What I do see – or rather, not what I see but the feelings aroused in me by that looking – is what I paint.” (the artist cited in Exh. ![]() As Kline described in an interview with Selden Rodman in the same year that he executed Flanders, “When I look out the window – I’ve always lived in the city – I don’t see trees in bloom or mountain laurel. ![]() The fast-paced, brash city is a formative undercurrent to much of the Action Painting that established New York as the new center of the art world in the post-war years of the mid-Twentieth Century, and this propulsive atmosphere was deeply embedded in the energetic and symbiotic compositions that poured forth in the 1950s from the brushes of both Franz Kline and his friend, Willem de Kooning. The vibrant energy of Flanders indubitably manifests Kline’s internalized response to the gritty and urban environs of Manhattan, an atmosphere so engrained into the very core of the Abstract Expressionist identity. Kline’s Abstract Expressionist paradigm sprang forth at the turn of the decade of the 1950s independent of the European modernist influences in the work of his fellow artists such as Willem de Kooning or Mark Rothko. Kline’s signature style of thick, broad brushstrokes, applied with an unerring calculation cloaked as apparent spontaneity, betrays little sign of his more realistic and figurative paintings of the 1940s. ![]() The tracery of broad strokes that demarcate the architectonic structure of Flanders retell the narrative of its execution, as well as the speed and vigor of the artist’s practice. Kline’s autograph pictorial language was founded on the dynamic juxtaposition of the two essential and basic chromatic components that have come to describe his legacy, and Flanders, as an archetypal example of its creator’s enduring aesthetic influence, ultimately celebrates the inherent tension between these simultaneously interdependent and autonomous opposites. Moreover, Flanders has held a privileged position within the illustrious collection of the Bergreen Family for over forty-five years, since it was acquired from Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York in 1968. This monolithic painting, the study for which is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, comprises a visceral onslaught of Kline’s inimitable aesthetic, and, as clear testament to its import, was included in the retrospective of the artist's career held in 1994-1995 at the Menil Collection in Houston, and travelling to the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. A draftsman to the core, Kline rigorously focused on structure, whether in the force of broad individual strokes or the refined balance of layering black over white or white over black, all within the confines of a single canvas such as Flanders. As such, the present work is exemplary of the rich connotations inherent in the artist’s most renowned paintings, all rooted in the plasticity of the paint and the purity of his unadulterated coloristic counterpoints. Flanders, painted in 1961 at the very apex of Kline’s most revered stylistic period, is brilliantly demonstrative of the artist’s sophisticated brand of Action Painting, evoking the compositional equilibrium that has become such an indelibly significant aspect of his artistic legacy through the vigorous swathes of rich black and crisp white that delineate its surface. It was with unparalleled gestural velocity and structural elegance that Franz Kline executed a singular oeuvre of supremely powerful canvases rendered in the stark yet eloquent polarity of his favored bichromatic palette. “When I look out the window – I’ve always lived in the city – I don’t see trees in bloom or mountain laurel. ![]()
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