A few black girders, and the white between them

Stand in front of it. Chief is large, roughly five feet tall by six feet wide (4 ft 10⅜ in by 6 ft 1½ in, a wide landscape canvas), and the first thing that registers, before any label, is a handful of broad black strokes laid across a white field. There are not many of them. A few wide, loaded black bars dominate the whole picture, and the rest is white. That is the entire vocabulary: black, white, and the speed of the brush. After a century of paintings crowded with color and detail, the bareness of it is the shock.

The black bars are not doing what marks usually do. They do not outline anything; they do not spell anything. They cross, brace, and lean on one another like beams or girders. They bear weight. The thick black forms swell, taper, and run off the edges of the canvas, and the whole thing reads like a built structure, framing or trusses or track or the side of a freight car, a weight-bearing scaffold standing in the room with you. Nothing is depicted. There is no train, no figure, no scene. And yet the picture feels constructed, architectural, as if you were looking at the steel skeleton of something rather than a painting of it. The stroke is not describing a structure. The stroke is the structure.

The move that changes the whole painting is to stop reading the black and start reading the white. The easy assumption, the one nearly everyone makes, is that Chief is black signs drawn on a blank white ground, the way you’d write on a clean page. It is not. Up close the white is painted, brushed and worked, and at the edges of the black bars it pushes back into them and even over them, white laid on top of black to bite a stroke down to the shape Kline wanted. The white is not the paper the black sits on. It is a second set of strokes, fighting the first.

This is the load-bearing fact about the picture, and it is why the black and the white seem to keep trading placesas you look: sometimes the black reads as a shape on white, and then the white reads as a shape cutting into black, and there is no settled answer about which is figure and which is ground. Both are doing the structural work. Neither is “just background.” Kline said this himself, as plainly as he ever put it:

I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.

That is not a stray remark; it is MoMA’s own anchor for the painting, the line the museum quotes to explain that Kline did not see himself as drawing black signs on a white ground. Taken at his word, the picture opens up. There are two colors here, and both of them are painted, and the bet of the whole canvas is that the white pulls exactly as much weight as the black.

One more thing lives at the edges. Along the borders of the black bars the line gets ragged: the brush dragged, ran dry, broke into streaks, threw small drips. Those edges are a record of velocity. The strokes were not slowly filled in; they were thrown, a wide brush heavy with paint moving fast across the canvas, and the dry-brushed, dripping margins are the fingerprint of that speed. The painting does not just show a structure. It carries the physical act of its own making, the trace of a body moving quickly, which is the thing that will matter most when we ask why Chief was a break.

With one caution, because MoMA itself raises it: what reads as velocity is partly staged. Like many of these so-called action paintings, Chief was very likely worked up deliberately from a small preliminary drawing, the thrown-looking stroke scaled up and reproduced rather than necessarily made in one fast pass. The speed is real in the mark; it is not a promise that the canvas was painted fast. That tension, a studied picture of a fast gesture, is not a flaw in the work. It is close to the center of what action painting actually was.