Franz Kline

I’m still working my through the Abstract Expressionists, and today I’m looking at the work of Franz Kline (1910 – 1962). Kline was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. While enrolled at Boston University, he took art classes at the Boston Art Students League from 1931 to 1935. In 1935, Kline went to London and attended Heatherley’s Art School from 1936 to 1938. He settled permanently in New York in 1939. During the late 1930s and 1940s, Kline painted cityscapes and landscapes of the coal-mining district where he was brought up, as well as commissioned murals and portraits. Kline was fortunate to have the financial support and friendship of two patrons, Dr. Theodore J. Edlich, Jr., and I. David Orr, who commissioned numerous portraits and bought many other works from him. In this period, he received awards in several National Academy of Design Annuals.

In 1943, Kline met Willem de Kooning at Conrad Marca-Relli’s studio and within the next few years also met Jackson Pollock. Kline’s interest in Japanese art began at this time. His mature abstract style, developed in the late 1940s, is characterized by bold gestural strokes of fast-drying black and white enamel. His first solo exhibition was held at the Egan Gallery, New York, in 1950. Soon after, he was recognized as a major figure in the emerging Abstract Expressionist movement. Although Kline was best known for his black-and-white paintings, he also worked extensively in color, from the mid-1950s to the end of his life.

Kline spent a month in Europe in 1960, travelling mostly in Italy. In the decade before his death, he was included in major international exhibitions, including the 1956 and 1960 Venice Biennales and the 1957 São Paulo Biennale, and he won a number of important prizes. Kline died in 1962 in New York. The Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D.C., organized a memorial exhibition of his work that same year.

1950 Cardinal

1950 Chief

1952 Painting Number 7

1952 Untitled

1953 New York, N.Y.

1953 Suspended

1954 Painting Number Two

1955 Orange Outline

1955 White Forms

1957 Untitled

1958 C and O

1958 Heaume

1959 Black Reflections

1959 Untitled

1959-60 Blueberry Eyes

1960 Harleman

1961 Le Gros

1961 Scudera

1961 Untitled

Mary Cassatt

American Artist Mary Cassatt was one of the original Impressionists, rare for an American and for a woman. Cassatt was the only American to exhibit her work in an exhibit of the original group of Impressionist Artists, including Degas, Renoir and Monet. Cassatt said that she "hated conventional art" and when invited by Edgar Degas to exhibit with this group of independent artists in an exhibit of non-academic art she was overjoyed.

Mary Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, a town that is now part of Pittsburgh. Her father was a wealthy investment banker. Cassatt grew up in Pennsylvania, but lived in Germany and France for four years during her childhood. She entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1861. In 1865 she studied Old Masters paintings in Paris.

Cassatt returned to the United States when the Franco-Prussian War erupted in 1870, but she went back the next year, despite her father's objections. She travelled and studied in Italy, Spain, Belgium, and France before settling permanently in Paris in 1875. She lived there for the rest of her life, despite the apparent fact that her affection for the French people was not great, and lessened with the passage of time.

In the late 1800s Paris was enormously progressive under the direction of the Emperor Napoleon III. While the city itself was undergoing dramatic modernization that made it the model for the modern world, the city's arts were bursting with enthusiasm. It was into this atmosphere that Cassatt settled.
In her early years in Paris, she exhibited at the Salon, France's annual juried exhibit which featured the best of conventional paintings of historical, religious and mythological subjects. But she grew restless with this kind of work and became enamoured of the work of the independent artists, later known as the Impressionists. Society at that time was embracing the scientific pronouncements of Darwinism and the industrial revolution was in full swing. The arts reflected the social unrest during this period of dramatic change. The Impressionists rejected the ethereal mythological subject matter of academic art, and painted life as they saw it, connecting the viewer to the biological world, and producing a very human sensibility in their work.

Cassatt's most famous paintings are of mothers with children, bathing, reading or doing other ordinary things. Despite the routine nature of the paintings, her style revealed emotional depth and intensity. She learned from Degas a sense of the immediate, allowing informal poses, gestures and fleeting moments to permeate her work.

Edgar Degas became a close friend of Cassatt's, mentored her and invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1877, 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886. She refused to exhibit there in 1882 when Degas did not exhibit. She was commissioned to do a mural for the Chicago World's Fair in 1892. After the 1886 exhibit Cassatt developed a business relationship with an art dealer named Paul Durand-Ruel who sponsored her first solo exhibit in the Durand-Ruel gallery in New York in 1893. In 1903 another showing of her work was exhibited there. She visited the United States in 1904, and for the last time in 1908.

Cassatt was influential in her support of the Impressionist movement, not just through her art, but financially, and through promotions of Impressionism. She arranged for Impressionist works to be sent to the United States through her brother Alexander. She encouraged him and others to purchase works by Monet, Manet, Morissot, Renoir and Pissaro. Alexander Cassatt ultimately became the first important art collector of Impressionist works in the United States.
Mary Cassatt died at Beaufresne, France in 1926.

1878 The Reader (Lydia Cassatt)

1890-1 The Letter

At the Francais, a Sketch

At the Theatre

Autumn (Lydia Cassatt)

Breakfast in Bed

Little Girl in a Large Red Hat

Little Girl in Big Straw Hat and a Pinafore

Lydia Seated at an Embroidery Frame

Mother and Child

Mother and Child

Mother Holding a Child in Her Arms

Nude Child

Self-Portrait

The Banjo Lesson

The Bath

1893-94 The Boating Party

Woman and Child Seated in a Garden

Young Girl at a Window

Young Mother Sewing