The locomotive, the calligraphy, and the gift

So why is it called Chief? Not for a person, and not for a Native American chief, though the word invites that read. “Chief” was the name of a locomotive, a train Kline remembered from his childhood. He grew up in the coal-and-railroad country of Pennsylvania, around Wilkes-Barre and Lehighton, and loved the railway, the engines and the speed and the sheer iron weight of it. Many of his black-and-white canvases carry titles of this kind: names of trains, places, mechanical things he knew. Viewers have always read engines and bridges and girders into them, which is fair, given how the strokes look. But the title is not a caption. It does not mean the painting is a picture of the locomotive. It points at a feeling of power and speed and built iron, the thing the train and the painting have in common, not at the train itself.

There is one reading of Chief that follows it everywhere, and it is one Kline himself rejected. Because the paintings are black marks on white, people compared them, endlessly, to East Asian calligraphy (the art of beautiful brush-writing in Chinese and Japanese) and to Zen brushwork, all that spare, swept ink on a pale ground. The resemblance is real to the eye, and Kline did know the Japanese avant-garde calligraphy world of the day. But he denied the equation flatly. He said he was not “painting black signs on a white ground,” and in a 1960 interview he pushed back directly, pointing out that “calligraphy is simply the art of writing,” and his pictures were not writing. The honest way to carry this is as a comparison Kline refused, not a fact about the work. Part of why he refused it is the thing already in front of us: calligraphy is black signs on a blank page, and in Chief the white is painted too. Both colors are active, which is precisely not how calligraphy works.

Chief did not wander far. It was painted in 1950, at the very start of Kline’s fame, and was acquired early by the New York lawyer and modern-art collector David M. Solinger (later president of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first head of the museum from outside the Whitney family). In 1952, Solinger and his wife gave the painting to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it has hung ever since. MoMA’s credit line records it precisely, the way these things should be recorded: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David M. Solinger. (The provenance, the documented chain of who has owned a work and when, is short and clean here: artist to collector to museum, no auction, no recorded price. Where a figure isn’t in the record, we leave it blank rather than invent one.)

What Kline left, in Chiefand the canvases like it, was a new thing a painting could be: a few black strokes and a worked white field at the scale of a wall, a tiny drawing made monumental, the speed of the body left on the surface, and not a single thing depicted. He was a stuck representational painter into his late thirties. By 1950 he had found the one move that was entirely his, and a locomotive’s name to hang on it, and with it one of the defining American paintings of its decade.