Untitled

Franz Kline, Untitled, ca. 1959, oil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1971.259
Copied Franz Kline, Untitled, ca. 1959, oil on paper, 24 x 19 in. (61.0 x 48.3 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1971.259

Artwork Details

Title
Untitled
Artist
Date
ca. 1959
Location
Not on view
Dimensions
24 x 19 in. (61.0 x 48.3 cm.)
Credit Line
Museum purchase
Mediums
Mediums Description
oil on paper
Classifications
Subjects
  • Abstract
Object Number
1971.259

Artwork Description

In the mid 1950s, having worked in black and white for more than five years, Kline reintroduced color. The short, choppy strokes and disharmonious swaths of yellow and red in Untitled make for a restless composition. The black shape, a central element in many of Kline’s paintings, resembles a form he used repeatedly in drawings of his wife Elizabeth, who was hospitalized for depression and schizophrenia for more than a decade. Asked at the time why he had portrayed her head as an empty square, he replied, “She isn’t there anymore.” Squares occur often in Kline’s work, and it is tempting to link the charged energy of the black form in Untitled with his long-standing, if rarely voiced, distress over Elizabeth’s continued illness.

Modern Masters: Midcentury Abstraction from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2008