The story everyone tells about how it started
There is a story about how Kline found his way to the black-and-white style, and it is worth telling, because MoMA itself tells it and almost everyone repeats it. It goes like this. One evening in 1948, in the studio of his friend Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Kline borrowed a projector (a Bell-Opticon, a device that throws an enlarged image of a small picture onto a wall) and used it to project one of his own tiny brush drawings, a thing only about four or five inches across. (In the most-repeated version, told by de Kooning’s wife, the painter Elaine de Kooning [1918–1989], the little drawing was of a rocking chair.) Thrown up onto the wall many times its real size, the small, casual marks changed. They stopped being a drawing of anything and became, in the standard phrasing, gigantic black strokes that wiped out any image, pure abstract force, the swept line made huge. And in that moment, the story says, Kline saw his future and walked into it.
It is a good story, and the part that matters is true: many of Kline’s black-and-white canvases really are a small, improvised drawing brought up to the scale of a wall, the offhand gesture fused with the deliberate decision to enlarge it. That is a real and useful way to understand what you are looking at in Chief.
The eureka-moment framing, though, takes some salt, because the people closest to it took it that way. The neat version compresses what was almost certainly a gradual shift into a single overnight conversion. De Kooning himself, asked about it, said the change “took quite a while to work it out,” which describes a slow working-out, not a thunderclap. So the projector holds best as the standard account, the one MoMA repeats and the one that genuinely captures the method (a tiny mark made monumental), with the memory that it is a story that has been tidied up over the years, not a documented record of one instant when everything changed.