FRANZ KLINE | UNTITLED

Within Allan Stone's expertise, his collection and his gallery program, Kline has held a significant place, standing shoulder to shoulder with other giants of Abstract Expressionism and his contemporaries Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky. Over several decades handling many of Kline's best known architectonic black-and-white oil paintings now in public and private hands, Allan Stone also developed a rigorous and dedicated connoisseurship for the intimately scaled studies in which Kline made his most profound breakthroughs, such as Untitled, 1958. In these small works on paper, Kline felt free to explore and invent unselfconsciously with an immediacy and a grand ambition that far exceeded their measurements, later expanding them into the large scaled works that established his supremacy among the greatest Post-War New York School artists. The artist’s breakthrough moment occurred in 1950 with a solo show Charles Egan Gallery and subsequent exhibitions with Sidney Janis. Kline would later be included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1958 exhibition The New American Painting, (the same year as Untitled, 1958) and several Whitney Annuals during the 1950s. He was exhibited internationally at the Venice Biennale (1956, 1960), Documenta 2, Kassel, Germany (1959), and the São Paulo Biennial (1957). From the 1960s onward, there have been regularly occurring monographic exhibitions at The Menil Collection, Houston (1994), Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (1994), and Castello di Rivoli, Torino (2004). Kline's works are in numerous international public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Tate Gallery, London, Art Institute of Chicago, among many others.