Book Description
This landmark exhibition catalog surveys the entire career of one of the last great painters of high modernism, Franz Kline. It features over 70 major works, including paintings, drawings, sketches, and documentary material. The works included have been selected from collections from around the world with the intent of showing all of Kline's achievements, from the early figurative oil paintings of the late 1930s and 1940s to his breakthroughs in Abstract Expressionism seen in a selection of his large-scale black-and-white works. This volume traces Kline's art from its beginnings to his last painting in 1961, just a few months before the artist's death.
Kline, along with Pollock and Motherwell, was at the center of Abstract Expressionism and "action painting" in the America. This volume demonstrates in the monumental canvases, as well as in his many small-scale sketches made on paper, newspaper, and even telephone book pages, how Kline embraces gesture, experience, and emotion with direct and raw energy.


About the Author
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is the chief curator at the Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea. She has written extensively on contemporary art and its relations with postwar European art. Among her publications is the first survey monograph on Italian informel artist Alberto Burri (1996).
David Anfam is a world-renowned expert on American Abstract Expressionism and is a regular contributor to The Burlington Magazine. His publications include Abstract Expressionism (1990), Franz Kline and Black & White, 1951-1961 (1994).
Dore Ashton is professor of art history at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Arts and Sciences in New York. She wrote about Franz Kline in Arts and Architecture magazine as early as 1956. Among her many books on modern art is About Rothko (1996).

FROM THE PUBLISHER