The painter who started over in black and white

For most of his working life, Franz Kline(1910–1962) was a representational painter, and not an especially celebrated one. Through the 1930s and 1940s he painted what painters were supposed to paint: city scenes, crowded interiors, a famous local barroom mural, portraits, the rocking landscape of the coal country he came from. He drew constantly, small and fast, in black ink. He sold a little, won a little, and was, by the end of the 1940s, a skilled and stuck painter in his late thirties, watching younger and louder friends rewrite what American art could be.

Those friends were the painters later grouped as the Abstract Expressionists, or the New York School: a loose downtown crowd, many of them with studios around Tenth Street, with Jackson Pollock pouring paint on the floor, Willem de Kooning tearing the figure apart, Mark Rothko stacking great soft rectangles of color. What they shared was a bet that a painting did not have to be a picture of anything, that it could be abstract and still carry real feeling and real seriousness. By 1950 they were the most exciting thing happening in painting anywhere, and New York, not Paris, was suddenly where it was happening.

Then, around 1949–1950, Kline did the thing that made him. He threw out color. He threw out the depicted world, the rooms and streets and faces. And he bet everything on the one thing he had always been good at, the black brush mark, blown up huge: a few enormous black strokes slashed across a white field, fast and loaded and wider than his own arm. Chief is one of the first major paintings of that breakthrough, made in 1950, and it announced a Kline nobody had seen before: not a painter of things, but a painter of the stroke itself.