Untitled

Franz Kline

1954 · Brush and black ink on paper · Modern and Contemporary Art

The present drawing is an elegant and jewel-like example of the diminutive but powerful works that the artist both considered finished drawings and expanded through projection into resounding canvases on a grand scale. Both angular and calligraphic, the work at once seems purely abstract (emphasizing the artist’s strong lines of ink, caught within the confines of his page—balanced, expressive, rigid—rather than figuring anything recognizable outside of the compositional space) but also somehow representative of the dynamic, gridded modernism and hustle of the city which he called home.

Artist

Franz Kline

Date

1954

Medium

Brush and black ink on paper

Department

Modern and Contemporary Art

Credit line

Gift of Mireille and James Levy, 2021