By doing so, through the visible and material trace of the painterly action, Kline intended to make his work the visualisation of the awareness of being in the present, in an absolute time, with neither a before nor an after: a phenomenology of being. 

On 12 May 2005 Christie’s held its “Post-War and Contemporary Art” auction, where Francesco Federico Cerruti purchased this small black tempera on paper by the American artist Franz Kline, a leading name in the American Abstract Expressionism (or Action Painting) that revolutionised modern art in the post-war period, moving it away from figurative art and representation, as well as from what was perceived as an excess of intellectualism on the part of the artists in the first avant-garde movements. Action painters, just like their counterparts in the European Art Informel movement, explored a form of abstraction in which the act of the painter coincided with the meaning and sense of the artwork. They did not seek to portray anything, but instead wanted to convey the very experience of being through their action in the world. Theirs was a quest for originality where original did not entail being innovative and different but was, rather, a question of reducing perception to a very basic level in order to reach the origins of existence and lingering there with the viewer of the works. By doing so, through the visible and material trace of the painterly action, Kline intended to make his work the visualisation of the awareness of being in the present, in an absolute time, with neither a before nor an after: a phenomenology of being. The concept of phenomenology enjoyed renewed interest after World War II, with the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the abstract art of that period was transformed on a global level, from Europe to the United States, Latin America, Africa and Asia (for example, the Gutai movement in Japan), into an art that sought to achieve an understanding of the essentiality of life, after the tragedies of the war period. While Jackson Pollock (1912-56) also identified the artwork with action through his use of dripping to create abstract cosmogonies, Kline was, instead, the artist who had the best understanding at the time of the need to convey even the smallest action on a large scale – to give a sense of the up-close and personal dimension with existence: his paintings are famous for appearing to be enlargements of what a person could draw quickly and with energy on a small sheet of paper. They are close-ups on a monumental scale, attracting those who look at the work towards the experience of pure vitality. Because of this, for every large painting, Kline produced numerous small preparatory works in gouache that conveyed the sense of the gravity of the action (gouache is a very opaque paint with good coverage because it is mixed with a bit of white, which gives the viewer a sense contrary to the lightness of transparent watercolour). The forms and structures of the paper works migrated from one painting to another, and Kline regularly explored works on paper in his gallery exhibitions. Art critics of the 1950s and 1960s often saw in these works - almost always black lines against the white background of the paper - the influence of calligraphy, but a closer study of Kline’s development instead suggests an interest in the increasing abstraction of moving elements, such as figures portrayed in diagonal, or the rocking chair on which his wife was sitting (fig. 1), or engineering structures, such as suspension bridges.1

The small gouache in the Cerruti Collection is probably a study for one or more larger paintings, which develops the structure of his earlier painting High Street (1950),2 and could have been produced at the same time as Untitled (1954), inverting the right/ left structure (fig. 2); the deliberately asymmetrical and unbalanced structure, which moves towards the top right, is developed in works such as Buttress (1956) in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. 

The work benefits from an excellent provenance, just as Francesco Federico Cerruti liked. Indeed, in 1958 it was recorded as being in the collection of Dr Theodore J. Edlich, Jr, one of the main early collectors of Franz Kline. He owned two of Kline’s very first works (Still Life with Puppet, c. 1940, fig. 3, and Nijinsky, 1940) now part of the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as around seven large paintings. In 1973, this small piece passed through the Waddington Galleries in London to the collection of the scientist and inventor David B. Pall and his wife Helen, who had a particular interest in works on paper, before entering Cerruti’s collection via the 2005 auction, after which it came to Europe, to his villa in Rivoli. Nearby, at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, I had recently curated the major retrospective dedicated to Franz Kline (20 October 2004 - 31 January 2005), an exhibition visited by Cerruti together with his assistant Annalisa Polesello Ferrari, who recalls how on that occasion the accountant expressed a wish to identify and collect a work by Kline, once again demonstrating a link between the exhibitions held in Turin’s museums and galleries and his private collection. Back in 1963, the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin had dedicated a solo exhibition to Kline curated by the poet Frank O’Hara, and it is possible that Cerruti remembered that event too, leading to his decision during his visit to the Castello di Rivoli to look for “his own” Kline. 

[Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev]

1 Rivoli 2004-2005. 

2 Ibid., p. 87.