10/13/2023 0 Comments Franz kline black subjectivity![]() They are to be felt, walked in front of, glimpsed, stared at, dwelt with. See how much the light and colour changes as we move, near, far the rectangle of the painting is rarely orthogonal. ![]() There is a reason these paintings are big, occasionally overpowering. Still cherished the central truth of painting as a bodily act and experience rather than an idea. Between the viewer and the embodied enigma that is painting stands no interpretation, nothing to diminish or ingratiate. His paintings’ very silence lets their flame-like colour appear in and for itself, and as the product of the human imagination can no more be explained away than we can ourselves ( PH–4, 1952, pictured). Difficulty alone does not deserve our interest, but difficulty achieved through conviction may satisfy the deepest and most inward categories of our questioning. “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us,” wrote the physician and essayist Sir Thomas Browne in 1658 these lapidary, timeless words are entirely appropriate for Still’s heroic ambition. His work constitutes an extreme of romanticism, possessing a nobility of purpose, dismissive of irony, quotation and the whole apparatus of art appreciation. It is today an attitude as rare and as mistrusted, yet as vital, as it was in the middle years of the 20th century. His paintings are huge in scale, their colour sombre and ecstatic. They are radiant with their core principles. They tend to singularities – described by Still as the ‘vertical necessity of life’ – that stand up in a confronting tall or wide surface plane spread with colour, co-existent with thresholds and borders. Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,Ĭlyfford Still had the essential tendency of the great American artists towards the wordless, to what the literary critic Harold Bloom calls ‘un-naming’. Still was aware of the false light that words can cast and the responsibility on the artist not to undermine art’s natural subjectivity with the assimilation society seeks. #Franz kline black subjectivity free#This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,Īway from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, My own ambition, it always seemed to me, was to push all the accepted notions over the edge – like Kline, I really did believe that making something new was a command that I had to respond to.Ĭlyfford Still by Christopher Le Brun PRA ![]() I could dissolve all this tight drawing and imagery from my past into these large open veils of colour. I felt a connection with what Kline did with his projections. My work moved on very rapidly when I returned to New York and started using the projector and tracing my projections. This was something I found uncomfortable. I was just so struck by its complete newness.Īfter leaving college, back in London, it was somewhat taken for granted that I would produce work that reflected an idea of being Black and British. The work had a reality, a ‘thingness’ about it to be valued. Kline had used a projector to blow-up and then trace his drawings onto canvas, to get away from overt subject matter and explore his real gift for scale and structure. It took me a good while after our meeting to realise the subject of the artist was the materials that they were using – it was about the paint itself and what you could do with it, not subject matter and storytelling. Now, in hindsight, I can see that Kline found a very distinct way to deliver the primacy and power of the medium through his black-and-white works ( Vawdavitch, 1955, pictured). It was just natural that if you were making money you would spend it. ![]() I found that more and more in America then, a sort of open generosity that didn’t come with any feelings of patronage. He was very generous and wouldn’t let any of us pay for a drink. He was a confident person who wore Levis and liked to dance. I remember him driving us in a big new car at great speed down to a restaurant. Kline seemed to live and dress as though he was a workman. It was pictorial and political in terms of the social unrest in the country and the racial tensions that came about at that time. I think the young people around me could sense this tension. You couldn’t mistake the stress in those agitated surfaces – the paintings were so direct, but also highly worked. I was impressed by the striking, aggressive brush strokes that broke up the rugged whites and greys with strong diagonal blacks. When we arrived we were hit by these big, in-your-face, black-and-white pictures standing all around his studio. It was on their initiative that we went to visit Kline. By chance I ended up in a kind of youth hostel sharing with lots of preppy types. ![]() I met Franz Kline in New York in the summer of 1961 while I was still a student at London’s Royal College of Art. From the Autumn 2016 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA. ![]()
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