FRANZ KLINE | UNTITLED

Lewis Dabe, New York

Acquired from above by the present owner

Exh. Cat., Turin, Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Franz Kline, 2004, p. 62, illustrated

New York, Allan Stone Gallery, Franz Kline: Architecture and Atmosphere, October 1997 - January 1998, fig. 1, illustrated

"I paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse in me." 

Franz Kline, Conversations With Artists, 1957 

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 his early representational works which reveal the bases for the abstract vocabulary that would established his supremacy among the greatest Post-War New York School artists. Kline's early interiors "are among his most important works as predecessors to his black-and-white paintings. They are executed with an eye to finding the underlying structures…and giving them dynamic linear and planar relationships." (Robert S. Mattison, Franz Kline, Coal and Steel, Allentown 2012, p. 62) 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.