A handful of huge black strokes laid across a white field, a tiny brush drawing blown up to the scale of a wall, named after a locomotive Kline knew as a boy. The white is painted as hard as the black, and that is the whole point.
The canvas
Tap to zoom
Franz Kline, Chief, 1950. Oil on canvas. 4 ft 10 3/8 in × 6 ft 1 1/2 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David M. Solinger, 1952 (acc. 2.1952)
Look closer
Find these on the canvas above
1
The broad black bars
Across the whole canvas, the few wide, loaded black strokes that dominate it
A handful of broad black strokes carry the entire picture. They do not outline anything; they are the structure itself. Follow how they cross, brace, and lean on one another like beams or girders bearing weight against each other and spanning the canvas. The painting is almost one big gesture, enlarged, drawing made monumental.
2
The white is painted, not blank
In and around the black, the worked white field
This is the thing most people get wrong about the picture. The white is brushed and worked, and at the edges it pushes back into and overlaps the black. It is not bare canvas and not a neutral background. Kline painted the white as actively as the black, so figure and ground trade places and both are doing structural work. His own line, "I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important," is a description of exactly this surface.
3
Speed at the stroke edges
Along the edges of the black bars, the ragged and dripped margins
The edges where the loaded brush moved fast drag, go dry and broken, and trail drips. Those edges record the velocity of the gesture. The strokes look thrown, and the picture carries the physical act of making them, the trace of a body moving at speed, not a slowly drawn shape. That said, the velocity is in the mark and not a guarantee about the making: like many of these canvases, Chief was very likely worked up deliberately from a small drawing, a fast gesture studied and enlarged rather than made in one pass.
4
Architecture without a building
The overall design, the bars framing and spanning like a structure
The whole thing reads like framing, trusses, track, or rolling stock, a built, weight-bearing scaffold, even though nothing at all is depicted. The black behaves like architecture: it spans, braces, and holds. That structural feeling, and not any pictured object, is what the marks are about.
5
No depicted object
The whole canvas, where a viewer looks for a figure, a thing, a locomotive
There is no train, no figure, no scene to find. There is no picture of anything here. The forms run off the edges of the canvas, implying motion continuing past the frame, but the title points at a feeling of power and speed, not at an image of the locomotive it is named for.
6
The scale, and your body
The full span of the work, about 4 ft 10 in tall and 6 ft 1 in wide
At roughly five by six feet, a small drawing’s single gesture has been blown up to room and body scale. The strokes are wider than your arm, so your whole body, not just your eye, reads them. The bigness is the argument: the same mark that would be a flick on a sketchbook page becomes a girder you stand in front of.
Painted in 1950, at the start of the black-and-white breakthrough that made him famous, and first shown in his early-1950s New York exhibitions. Acquired soon after by the collector David M. Solinger.
c.1951–1952
David M. Solinger
New York
The New York lawyer and modern-art collector David M. Solinger (later president of the Whitney Museum of American Art) acquired the canvas early, while Kline was just becoming known. No purchase figure is documented in the sources.