Franz Kline -- Why Do I Love You So?

With Rue and Study for Siegfried, it's because I seem to be in Russell Crowe's garage in "A Beautiful Mind",

There with Kline, nothing more, maybe not even with Kline or Crowe, just there.

Early Morning With Kline

When I woke up this morning at 4, it was you Kline, and also, Mr. Hobbes.
Thom Hobbes, the ten pound cat.

Hobbes stayed on my chest and you took me back to my other life,
Maybe the garage, maybe somewhere else.

Hobbes was still there at 6, the wake up call.

Time to be part of the world where all of the others reside.

Kline, I'll see you later.

Seriously though, why do I love Franz Kline? Probably because his paintings are not to mean anything. He is New York and his paintings are New York. If I could live anywhere other than where I am, New York would be it. Kline also loved opera, especially Wagner. I'm not so much of a Wagner woman. In addition to Joe Green, my next favorite opera composer is Hayden. Quite a leap, but if you've actually watched a Hayden opera you might agree.

Kline became world famous and procured the wealth that went with that for his Abstract Expressionist paintings. In 1958, the art world stood up and took notice when he had the money to buy a brand new black Thunderbird. After walking into the East Hampton Ford agency and then taking possession of his new chariot, he lamented that having the money to buy the car or anything else money could buy did him no good since he couldn't eat or drink what he wanted. Kline suffered from a long standing heart problem that brought his death on May 13, 1962. However, the art world was never the same after the Thunderbird. It was a metaphor for change; the New York bohemian life style was on its way out to be replaced by that lived by wealthy artists and their patrons.

Kline had spent the last few years of his life with Elisabeth Ross Zogbaum. For her and for his wife Elizabeth who he spent many years visiting in mental institutions, I turn to this poem by Frank O'Hara – what I think of as a consummate love poem. O'Hara spoke of a drink other than Kline's favorite drink, beer. However it is the perfect love poem for spouse, lover, significant other. The video is quite worth watching because it is Frank O'Hara himself speaking. However, for those of you who also want to read the poetry, the poem follows.

Having a Coke with You, by Frank O'Hara

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irun, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluoresent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary

it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the "Polish Rider" occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the "Nude Descending a Staircase" or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michaelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

So Kate, Do You Like Franz Kline?

I knew it would come to this, one of these days I would have nothing to write and I would have to drag it out of someone. We were standing in the elevator and she was annoyed at these other elevator travelers who took us for a ride, us and our cart of chairs. So I asked her then, "Do you like Franz Kline?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Uhhh, I just do. Why Amy?"
"I mean, you do, but why, I mean why do you like him? It's all just big black lines on white."
"Because it's non-representational. I like abstract art."
"Yes, but what does it mean?"
"It doesn't mean anything."
Then we got off the elevator, after other passengers dilly dallyed around and we had to haul this cart out and no one seemed to mind the fact that we'd been on that elevator for a solid five minutes. Moments we could have spent doing any number of tasks at our computers, or God forbid, looking at the Kline as we discussed it. I persisted in our conversation.
"So you like him?"
"Yes, it doesn't have to mean anything, that's the problem with people. They always want to know what abstract art means, it means nothing, it's just here. That's all its supposed to be. It's aesthetic."
"But how does it make you feel. If its aesthetic it will provide a mood and give you a feeling, and I want to know how it makes you feel."
"It doesn't have to evoke a mood to be aesthetic. It is what it is. it doesn't even have to be aesthetic. It just is what it is."
"When you walk by our Franz Kline, do you like it every day, do you change the way you feel about it based on the way you feel that day?"
"I don't really love OUR Franz Kline. I like composition, and this one..not so much."

Franz Kline Meets Robert Creeley – "Thank You"

Reading about Franz Kline, you find he drank a great deal. Some even said when he wasn't painting what he did was drink. His favorite place to do that was where most of the other Abstract Expressionist would go, the Cedar Street Tavern. He was a regular and this snippet from Irving Sandler captures the scene...

"Franz Kline held court at the Cedar Street Tavern almost every night after ten. He would talk to anyone and consequently was the most accessible of his peers to young artists - and to me. Franz was the most amiable of the older Abstract Expressionists. As one admirer recalled 'He liked beer at the Cedar Bar and English tea in the studio. He could play the dandy or the clown, act like Ted Lewis, Wallace Beery, or Mae West, talk about rugs, vintage cars, Gericault's horse, baseball, and Baron Gros. He loved jazz and Wagner. He was a confirmed New Yorker, but had roots that he never forgot in the gritty coal country of eastern Pennsylvania.... He could juggle life until it came up fun.' ... Every now and then Franz would grow silent, his eyes distant, and he would appear overcome with loneliness - even in the company of friends - a look that is often caught in photographs of him. I often wondered how much of this sadness was caused by the plight of his wife, Elizabeth, a former ballet dancer. From 1948 to 1960, she was committed to a mental institution where Franz visited her periodically." (self-portrait to the left done in 1946)


There's more though. Kline was not only friends with artists but also poets and other writers. Here's a wonderful look into Kline. Basil King recounts Franz Kline meeting the poet, Robert Creeley, for the first time in the Cedar Bar.

"But to this day Franz Kline meeting Robert Creeley is one of the most beautiful things that I have ever witnessed. Bob and I were drinking beer in one of the booths that lined the walls of the old Cedar Bar.Bob had recently moved back to the states and had stopped off in New York on his way to Black Mountain College. Bob was wearing the blue winter coat that Zukofsky had given him. He didn’t have any money, and I had credit at the bar. It was late in the afternoon, and Franz Kline walked in and sat down next to me. Franz, meet Robert Creeley. Awe came over Kline’s face. He shifted his weight, adjusted his brown hat, and took Bob’s hands and held them. “I can’t tell you how much your poetry means to me.” Franz was still holding Bob’s hands when Bob broke the silence. “Thank You.”

Who Gets to Call it Art?

Last night I watched the movie "Who Gets to Call it Art?" about Henry Geldzahler, the Met's curator of modern art in the 1960's. Originally, he didn't want to work there, he told them, because all their artists were dead. He wanted to work at the Whitney, where they cared about modern art. The Met offered him $5000 a year, and he began a career of telling New York what to call art. He hung Franz Kline's Untitled and said "What one sees is distorted by the strength of the emotions felt by the artist as he's committing the painting."
In the film, a tribute to the great Geldzahler, Frank Stella and John Chamberlin shared stories about Franz Kline. John Chamberlin recalled being in a bar with Kline, and having him tell the bartender "Just line me up ten beers so I don't have to bother you so often." And when he recalled the night, Chamberlin smiled that grizzled old mechanic smile.
Stella had another memory, of being in a bar with Kline. Someone wanted proof of who the best young artist of the day was, and Kline told him, "Gather up all the artists, then drag them outside, lift the lid in the street and throw them into the sewer. The first one that climbs out is the best artist."
Surly lover of the gritty, I think you would have given all the other artists a run for the sunlight.

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.