Franz Kline

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Gimpel Fils Gallery, London (acquired from the above in April 1956)
Charles Gimpel, London
Gimpel & Hanover Galerie, Zurich
Acquired by the present owner from the above in August 1980

This work is in very good condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at +1 (212) 606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a brown wood frame with silver gilt facing and small float.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Franz Kline was the great master of gestural velocity and muscular compositions rendered in eloquent and powerful counterpoints of paint-laden black and white brushstrokes. Painted at the height of his mature period, Intersection is a quintessential example of the rich connotations inherent in Kline’s compositions, all rooted in the plasticity of the paint and the purity of the palette.  A draftsman to the core, Kline rigorously focused on structure, whether in the force of broad individual strokes or the sophisticated balance of layering black over white or white over black, all within the confines of a single canvas such as Intersection. Kline’s autograph pictorial language was founded on the dynamic juxtaposition of these essential and basic chromatic components, ultimately celebrating the inherent tension between simultaneously interdependent and autonomous opposites.

The decade of the 1950s witnessed Kline’s emergence at the forefront of American Abstract Expressionism, beginning with his first one-man show at Egan Gallery in New York in which eleven black and white paintings affirmed his arrival at the most triumphant period of his artistic career. Although other colors would intermittently return to his canvases or delicately punctuate a black and white painting, Kline’s reduction of palette was now ascendant in his work, allowing him to more fully explore form through line and space through movement within an abstract idiom. As semi-representational imagery was relinquished and the artist liberated line from likeness, the forthright black square, triangles and diagonals of  his visual lexicon gain a strength and presence as individual and impactful as Pollock’s drip, Newman’s zip, and Rothko’s stacks of ethereal hues. Intersection exhibits the structure of angular dynamism and rhythmic tonal harmony that characterize Kline’s inimitable ability to refine and energize the composition in one burst of creative inspiration. Beginning with drawings made on pages from telephone books, Kline carefully chose the works that would be translated to canvas, seeking images that were constructs of angles and arcs intersecting within lyrical areas of voided space, eliciting one possible allusion for the title of this painting.

The vibrant energy of Intersection may also manifest Kline’s internalized response to the gritty and urban environs of Manhattan. The fast-paced, brash city is a formative undercurrent to much of the “Action Painting” that established New York as the new center of the art world in the post-war years of the mid-Twentieth Century. The propulsive atmosphere was deeply embedded in the energetic and symbiotic compositions that poured forth in the 1950s from the brushes of both Franz Kline and his friend, Willem de Kooning. Like de Kooning’s 1955 painting titled Interchange, Intersection is packed with a sense of jagged and jolting forms, infused with a vitality that implies the rhythms of the streets of downtown New York. Intersection thus refers both metaphorically and figuratively to the infrastructure of the city, as the framework of horizontals and verticals create a scaffolding to support the power of Kline’s paintbrush.

No less an observer than Elaine de Kooning famously stated, “It was Kline’s unique gift to be able to translate the character and the speed of a one-inch flick of the wrist to a brushstroke magnified a hundred times.” (Exh. Cat., Washington, D. C., Gallery of Modern Art, Franz Kline Memorial Exhibition, 1962, p. 16)  With its gentle wisps of white over the black cross section that spans the white expanse, Intersection belies the misleading assumption that Kline simply painted heavy black strokes over white backgrounds. Rather, the artist unerringly alternated between the two colors to achieve a taut, unified composition, improvised through a strong instinct for equivalent paint areas.  One senses that each application of one color invited a corresponding gesture from the other, so that Intersection’s balanced dynamism evokes a strong kinetic response from the viewer.