21 Etchings and Poems – Franz Kline Collaborates with Frank O'Hara

Having read several poems written about Franz Kline's work, I decided to search for more on the "internets". Late last night I found this work by Franz Kline and Frank O'Hara. Originally part of an artist's book called 21 Etchings and Poems, it embodies the collaboration of not only Kline and O'Hara but also that of poets and painters in the 1950's and 1960's. The book itself was the most significant collaboration to that point between artists and poets in America.



And here so we can all read O'Hara's work is a more legible version...
Poem (To Franz Kline)

I will always love you
though I never loved you

a boy smelling faintly of heather
staring up at your window

the passion that enlightens
and stills and cultivates, gone

while I sought your face
to be familiar in the blueness

or to follow your sharp whistle
around a corner into my light

that was love growing fainter
each time you failed to appear

I spent my whole self searching
love which I thought was you

it was mine so briefly
and I never knew it, or you went

I thought it was outside disappearing
but it is disappearing in my heart

like snow blown in a window
to be gone from the world

Those words stayed with me all night. I awoke to "I will always love you/though I never loved you". Words written by O'Hara, a man who loved life, loved New York and loved action painting. He loved everything that was in the moment that captured precisely the how and when of the present. I dedicate this entry to Amy, the one who embodies the love of the present in our lives. May you continue to give the rest of us the images of the precision of your emotions.

Docent Training

I'm in docent training. Dan is in my class. One day, a few weeks into training I saw him on a sidewalk and he gave me a cigarette. When I saw him in class the following week I said "I'll sit in the back of the bus with you."
The first gallery we studied was the CMCA, Contemporary and Modern. For our first assignment I chose to research Eugene Berman, the surrealist, because two weeks before that I had taken my brother and husband through and it had caught our attention. But this isn't Eugene Berman week, I digress.
Anyway, Dan chose the Kline. Which hadn't done anything for me up to that point. Up until then I pretty much didn't look at it. It seemed like a mess, but not my mess. We had never presented anything for each other before. Dan made a lot of wise cracks from the back of the room, but that was about all the talking he did. He didn't ask any questions because he already knew all the answers.
When it was his turn he walked right up to the Kline and he started swinging his arms around "This is all masculine energy." he said loudly and triumphantly. He pantomimed the making of it. He smiled his Dan smile and talked about Kline and his motivation and his movements and expression, and suddenly that painting meant something to me. Suddenly it had life. That's what art is, if you talk about it and share yourself with it, it makes you more alive. If it makes someone else excited, it excites me too.
Yesterday I walked through the special exhibit, Madame Du Pompadour. There is a Fragonard downstairs that moves like Baroque music. It transported me to Italy. But not until I stood before it with a French Philosophy professor who opened the door for me. She told me what she heard and how the painting moved and there I was, right there with her, where only moments ago I had been in the dark.

Franz Kline 1959, Steve Martin 1981 – Rue

This piece by Franz Kline, famous Abstract Expressionist painter, is entitled Rue (on loan to the Portland Art Museum from a private collection). Like his other paintings, Rue is the result of Kline having lived for many years in New York. He said that the feelings aroused in him by seeing the city for so long was what he painted. Although some abstract expressionist painters of his day left their paintings untitled. Kline chose to name many of them. Just before his first one man show he asked Willem and Elaine De Kooning to help him name his paintings. "[I]n a spirit of levity with a bottle of scotch on the table," was how Elaine would later describe the eight hour naming session. My own mind turns over the word rue and I chuckle thinking about the person who rues the day that he ate the rue he had found on the "rue".

Kline definitely belongs to the sub-group of abstract expressionists known as action painters. In my reading I found this quote from his friend Philip Pavia , "When I would visit Kline in his studio, he had stretched a large canvas on the wall, and underneath he would push with his feet a wood beer box to a certain spot. After a few trials and errors, he fixed the box into a right spot. He then slanted a plank from the floor with one end on the beer crate. A temporary ramp. Coming up the plank and down the plank, he slanted his brushstrokes for long strokes or short ones, and some of them were very loaded with paint."

Although Kline's paintings were the result of the emotions the city aroused in him and he didn't care to be in his painting, one owner of Rue did say that he could see himself in it. Steve Martin is listed as being the previous owner of this painting and had always said that he wanted to be part of it. The Portland Art Museum is also exhibiting the photo Annie Leibovitz took of Steve Martin in Beverly Hills when he posed for his portrait. Complete with black brushstrokes on his white suit, Martin realized his dream. A companion photo appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

N.C. Wyeth Quotes

"Thoreau's tremendous force to me as an artist, lies within his ability to boil up the little into the big! To elevate the little into the great is genius."

"His (Howard Pyle's) first words to me will forever ring in my ears as an unceasing appeal to my conscience: "My boy, you have come here for help. Then you must live your best and work hard!"...from that moment I knew that he meant infinitely more to me than a mere teacher of illustration."

"To paint the sleeve, become the arm!"

"I find the earliest years of my life are the source of my best inspiration." This is a recollection of his growing up on a homestead built by his ancestors in 1730. As a boy he saddled horses, used scythes, split wood and plowed fields.

N.C. Wyeth is much more to me now, seven days later, than he was last Wednesday.

N C Wyeth Did Murals - Apotheosis of the Family

Can you name the artist who painted this mural? Of course it's N C Wyeth's week on this blog and the title for today provides a huge clue, so the answer must be N C Wyeth. Seriously though, who would have thought that the master of illustration would paint this mural or be asked to take on such a mammoth project? 

Commissioned in 1932 by the Wilmington Savings Fund Society (WSFS) in Wilmington, Delaware when N C really wanted to do something other than be "just an illustrator", the mural is made up of five canvas pieces that span a total of 60 feet by 19 feet. For the voyeurs amongst us, N C Wyeth's youngest son, the famous painter Andrew Wyeth then 15 years old, is standing as a naked adolescent, hoisting a bow and arrow.

The mural depicts a family standing in front of a house, surrounded by neighbors. They have been harvesting fruit, weaving baskets, planting crops, hauling fish and chopping timber. It also shows the seasons, as spring merges into summer, then autumn and winter. Some say this is a theme N.C. Wyeth may have borrowed from his son-in-law, Peter Hurd. Done in the grand manner style of murals from the 19th century, N C also used bright colors, unusual perspectives and powerful abstract forms of clouds, smoke and sea, reflecting Wyeth's interest in avant- garde Russian art, and works by Marc Chagall.

Although Wilmington Savings Fund Society restored the mural in 1998, the WSFS, in 2007, deinstalled and has donated the mural to the Delaware Historical Society during the renovations and recreation of the bank edifice as a different commercial endeavor. The Delaware Historical Society planned to install the mural in its Research Library facility down the street in fittingly another former bank building. Work to de-install and store the mural was contracted to Ely Inc. and entailed its removal and storage. "Removal of this oversized work was achieved by removing canvas panels attached to a wall and rolling them onto five large tubes. The removal project was directed and overseen by Ely and called upon the services of five different conservators, an environmental safety company and a hazardous material abatement company."

How The Artist See's Himself

This is an oil on canvas self portrait of the artist, he painted it in 1913. He was 31 years old, just a year older than I am now.
Lately I have been realizing how hard it is to see oneself. My mind interprets me differently from moment to moment. John said trying to understand my moods is like watching a fish under the water, you never know where its going. Sadly, this feels true.
N.C. Wyeth paints himself white in a dark room. At this point he was a famed illustrator who wanted to be known as a painter. He made a great living illustrating for magazines and books (Treasure Island, Robin Hood, Last of the Mohicans) but he felt painting was the more impressive craft. And paint he did, he tried landscapes in an Impressionist style and portraits that recall the work of the American Regionalist artists, but he never really got what he wanted. I guess it wasn't the enormous house and flooding bank account he was after. I think he enjoyed living there, and I think his illustrations and his paintings prove he had a fantastic imagination into which he could escape. But I get the feeling that at times even great big fish dart here and there in search of something.

N C Wyeth and Grandson Both Die on Tracks

When do you know a train is approaching? Amazingly, the time between when you hear, see, or feel a train's approach and when it crosses your path can be so short that you don't have the time to react. Whatever happened that sunlit morning in Pennsylvania, both N C Wyeth and his grandson Newell, who had yet to turn four, died in the crash. Newell was Nathaniel (N C's son) and Caroline Wyeth's second born child. The first had also died but in that child's case shortly after birth. Newell had become the cornerstone of N C's life when he wasn't painting. Every morning N C would pick Newell up and take him on his round of errands. They had stopped at least one other time that morning to look at the beauty of the countryside.

The happenings of that morning and the intrigue going on in the Wyeth family at the time make Wyeth's life loom large as do his canvases. It's all very gothic and well documented in David Michaelis' biography of N C published in 1998. Having been "trapped" in a car myself when a locomotive has approached, I can only hope that young Newell was unaware of the steam engine as it hurtled towards the car.

Caroline Wyeth had written many poems in her life including this one sometime after the death of her first baby.


A Child Is Born

The mind cannot accept a wound
too deep upon the heart.
When tragedy with cutting knife
descends, the two must part.
The heart to stagger on alone,
unsuccored and unseen,
'Till time at last comes to her side
her painful wound to clean.

Perhaps those words were of comfort to her with this second tragedy, the death of both her young son and her father-in-law/confidant, N C. Wyeth.