True to an alternate name for Abstract Expressionism, "action painting," Kline's pictures often suggest broad, confident, quickly executed gestures reflecting the artist's spontaneous impulses. Yet Kline seldom worked that way. In the late 1940s, chancing to project some of his many drawings on the wall, he found that their lines, when magnified, gained abstraction and sweeping force. This discovery inspired all of his subsequent painting; in fact many canvases reproduce a drawing on a much larger scale, fusing the improvised and the deliberate, the miniature and the monumental.
"Chief" was the name of a locomotive Kline remembered from his childhood, when he had loved the railway. Many viewers see machinery in Kline's images, and there are lines in Chief that imply speed and power as they rush off the edge of the canvas, swelling tautly as they go. But Kline claimed to paint "not what I see but the feelings aroused in me by that looking," and Chief is abstract, an uneven framework of horizontals and verticals broken by loops and curves. The cipherlike quality of Kline's con-figurations, and his use of black and white, have provoked comparisons with Japanese calligraphy, but Kline did not see himself as painting black signs on a white ground; "I paint the white as well as the black," he said, "and the white is just as important."
Publication excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 205.
Franz Kline began his career as a figurative painter, but in the late 1940s, he used a projector to enlarge his drawing of a black rocking chair onto the wall. Intrigued by the way the image appeared abstract when it was enlarged, he decided to dedicate himself to creating large-scale, black-on-white abstract works. “I paint the white as well as the black,” he once said, “and the white is just as important.”
The dynamic curves and slashes of Chief may seem spontaneous, but this painting, like many of his so-called action paintings, was likely carefully reproduced from a preliminary study. The painting’s title refers to the name of a train that passed through his childhood hometown in Pennsylvania. Many of Kline’s works, though non-representational, seem to suggest through their titles and through the stark, pulsing compositions the bridges, railroad tracks, and machinery of America. Kline’s material of choice—inexpensive, low-viscosity house paints—also points to the artist’s interest in industry and consumerism.
