Franz Kline by Corina E. Rogge

Author:Corina E. Rogge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: J. Paul Getty Trust, The
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 5.13

Although Kline’s first show at the Sidney Janis Gallery was not until 1956, this business card dated 1955 authorizes Kline to purchase supplies on the gallery account.

Access to supplies clearly has an impact on an artist’s overall production, so underwriting the purchase of materials was an astute business decision by Sidney Janis; he may also have had additional, subtler motives. Janis reportedly asked Kline to use more stable artists’ paints rather than house paints (Gaugh and Kline 1979, 12) (Irving Sandler said Janis went so far as to sneak into Kline’s studio and replace his house paints with artists’ paints [Rogala 2016, 26]), perhaps because of already perceptible yellowing of some white areas in Kline’s works. Although this yellowing happened during his lifetime, Kline was not disturbed by it. In an interview with Sylvester, he said, “The whites, of course, turned yellow, and many people call your attention to that, you know; they want white to stay white forever. It doesn’t bother me whether it does or not. It’s still white compared to black” (Sylvester 1963, 2). Although Kline apparently thought that the relationship of the forms was not altered by yellowing (which provides insight into Kline’s thinking about the relationships between black, white, and color), Janis could not have considered it good for business to have his clients complain about such changes. Janis likely felt that by paying for the materials he could influence their quality or at least keep cost considerations from dominating Kline’s decisions about materials. The influence of his new gallerist may have significantly affected the aging and current condition of Kline’s later pieces.

Still, house paints differ from artists’ paints in many ways, and Kline probably begrudged more than the time spent “continually squeezing paint from tubes” as he began to work with artists’ paints. House paints are designed to have different flow characteristics and drying times than artists’ paints, and although we have no record of Kline describing this directly, Elaine de Kooning (1962, 68) wrote, “It took months before the artist, used to struggling with rubbery, stringy paint, could adapt himself to its easy flow and yielding ways. He was appalled when he first began to use good tube whites—titaniums, zincs, permalbas, flakes—with their uniformity of surface and lack of body, and again, he had to evolve a completely different way of working—this time to avoid slickness and ingratiating effects.”

As there are currently no definitive markers that distinguish artists’ oil paints from retail trade oil paints, we do not know if Kline truly did cease using house paints. GC-MS analysis of his later works shows only one instance where fish oils, such as were found in Wotan and other early works, may be present; however, the absence of fish oil does not prove that all (or indeed any) of these different paints were artists’ paints. The presence of titanium dioxide – calcium sulfate coprecipitated pigments in works dating from 1950 through 1961 suggest that Kline may have continued to use retail trade white

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