When the stroke became the structure

To feel why Chief was new, picture what serious American abstraction looked like around it. It was, mostly, full. Jackson Pollock wove whole fields of poured line edge to edge, color and tangle everywhere, no center and no rest. Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb worked in color and atmosphere, soft glowing rectangles or pictographic signs. Willem de Kooning churned the figure into thick, color-loaded paint. Even the most gestural of this painting kept a great deal of stuff on the canvas: color, depth, light, a crowd of marks. The reigning idea of an ambitious abstract picture was richness.

Kline did the opposite. He performed a radical subtraction. Out went color. Out went atmosphere and depth. Out went any depicted object, and out went the crowd of marks. What he kept was a handful of huge black strokes against white, and he bet the entire painting on them, at the scale of a wall. Chief is almost one gesture, enlarged: a small drawing’s worth of marks blown up until it is monumental. Where his peers added, Kline took away, until almost nothing was left but the stroke and the room it filled.

Here is the genuinely new move. In nearly all painting before this, a mark is in service to something else: it is a contour (the outline of a thing), or a sign (a letter, a character, a symbol that stands for a thing). Kline’s black bar is neither. It does not outline an object and it does not write a word. It is structure itself: it spans, braces, bears weight, holds the picture up the way a girder holds up a building. The architecture you feel in Chief is not a depicted building; it is the strokes behaving like architecture. And because, as we already saw, the white is painted too, this is a real two-way structure of black and white, not signs on a blank.

And then there is the speed, which is the deepest part of the break. Because the strokes are thrown, fast and wide and loaded, with those dragging, dripping edges, the painting registers the physical event of making it. You are not looking at a careful image so much as at the frozen record of a body moving quickly across a canvas. This is exactly the territory the critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) would name in 1952, two years after Chief, when he coined the phrase “action painting.” His idea was that for these painters the canvas had become an arena to act in, and the painting was the trace of that act, paint as the record of a bodily event rather than a picture of the world. Chief, made in 1950, is one of the defining early proofs of it: a painting whose real subject is the speed and force of the hand that made it.