9/7/2023 0 Comments Franz kline black subjectivity![]() ![]() ![]() 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. 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. In 2018 Platzker resumed his role of president of Specific Object, contributing essays to the monographs "Charles Gaines : Palm Trees and Other Works" (Hauser & Wirth, 2019) "John Baldessari Catalogue Raisonné: Volume Six: 2011-2019" (Yale University Press, 2021) and "Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Eight" (Steidl/Gagosian Gallery, 2021).“When I look out the window – I’ve always lived in the city – I don’t see trees in bloom or mountain laurel. From 2013 until February 2017, Platzker was Curator of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, where he co-curated the exhibitions "There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4’33" (2014), "Sites of Reason" (2014), "Gilbert & George: The Early Years" (2015), and "Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions" (2017), which traveled to the Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, under the title Concepts and Intuitions, 1965–2016 (2018). ![]() In 2004, he founded Specific Object, a gallery and think tank dedicated to ephemeral materials of the 1960s forward. ![]() His work centers on art after 1958, with an emphasis on Pop, Fluxus, Minimal, and Conceptual art-what informed those movements and successive generations of artists whose work follows formally and intellectually from these precursors.īetween 19, Platzker was the Executive Director of the non-profit bookstore Printed Matter. David Platzker is an art historian, curator, writer and art dealer. ![]()
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