a cognitive approach to abstract expressionism

Franz Kline's "Probst I": A Cognitive Approach to Gestural AbstractionAuthor(s): Claude CernuschiSource: Journal of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Vol. 6 (1994), pp. 76-98Published by: Museum of Fine Arts, BostonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20519764 .

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Fig. i. Franz Kline, American, i9io-i962.

Probst I, I96I. Oil on canvas, 274.3 x 202.3 cm

(io8 X 79 5/8 in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;

gift of Susan Morse Hilles. I973.636.

CLAUDE CERNUSCHI

Franz Kline's Probst I: A Cognitive Approach to Gestural Abstraction

PR 0 B ST I (fig. I), in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,I is a paradig matic example of Franz Kline's (I9IO-I962) mature style, a style whose most conspicuous formal properties are large-scale, gestural application of paint; an abstract configuration of forms; and a color scheme that gravitates primarily, though not exclusively, toward using black and white in opposition. In fact, it is often said that Kline's abstractions are so singular and idiosyncratic as to be recognizable at a glance. But, however characteristic Kline's signature images may be, the properties his work exhibits are hardly unique. Large scale and gestural painting were typical of New York School abstraction,2 and a number of Abstract Expressionists intentionally explored the aesthetic possibilities implicit in the opposition of dark and light.3

Yet, formal attributes were not the only elements Kline shared with his contemporaries. Like many Abstract Expressionists, he construed his own abstract pictorial idiom as essentially meaningful, but found himself either unable or reluctant to verbalize what those meanings were.4 While describing the formal and thematic development of his images, for example, the artist declared that his first instances of work in black and white "seemed related to figures, and I titled them as such. Later the results seemed to signify something-but difficult to give subject [or] name to, and at present I find it impossible to make a direct verbal statement about the paintings in black and white."5 In other words, Kline described his signature style as evolving from figu ration to abstraction and from meanings that were inextricably tied to figural representation to meanings that were more ambiguous-so

much so that Kline himself had difficulty articulating them. The incapacity or unwillingness of New York School artists to dis

cuss their intentions, however, hardly implies that their work is devoid of meaning. Some Abstract Expressionists considered verbal explanations tantamount to making the visual experience of looking at a picture redundant, if not altogether obsolete. Mark Rothko (1903 I970), an important member of the group, insisted that although he

was perfectly capable of providing a detailed exegesis of his own work, such explanations induced only "paralysis of the mind and imagina tion."6 For others, as Kline's own avowal insinuates, the process of signification may have occurred on a level the English sociologist

Anthony Giddens calls "practical consciousness": situations where individuals employ meanings consciously, but are unable to articulate them discursively.7

Such an avoidance of verbalization, however, whether deliberate or inadvertent, poses a variety of problems for interpretation, not least

CLAUDE CERNUSCHI is Assistant Professor of Art History at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

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of which is that New York School abstraction is grounded neither in recognizable subject matter nor in easily decipherable conventions of

meaning. In such an enigmatic situation, how may a viewer construe meaning? How is the act of interpretation set into motion?

These questions were of particular importance to Kline; his own statements suggest that he understood a painting's potential to "signi fy something" precisely in terms of its capacity to affect the spectator.

When discussing artists whose works he admired-such as Honore Daumier (i808-i879), Albert Pinkham Ryder (I847-19I7), or Hyman Bloom (born i9I3)-Kline stated that "the final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotion come across? "8

And when the critic David Sylvester asked him whether his paintings had a "particular emotional content," whether some paintings were "cheerful" or "sad," whether he conceived of his works in those terms, and whether those terms were important to him, Kline answered all of these questions in the affirmative. "What I try and do," he explained, "is to create the painting so that the overall thing has [a] particular emotion."9

Concern for things emotive was hardly unique among artists of Kline's generation. In fact, Kline's statements (like the formal proper ties he chose to exploit) fit very comfortably within the general con text of Abstract Expressionism. In an often-quoted statement, for instance, Rothko denied being interested "in relationships of color or form ... only in expressing basic human emotions-tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on."'0 Similarly, Robert Motherwell (i9i5-i991), gener ally considered one of the most important spokesmen for Abstract Expressionism, insisted that the function of aesthetics was "a means for getting at the infinite background of feeling in order to condense it into an object of perception. We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling."",

From the statements quoted above, one may conclude that the Abstract Expressionists made their intentions perfectly clear. The problem any would-be interpreter faces, however, is that beyond indi cating their concern for evoking emotional states, neither Kline nor his contemporaries clarified how states of mind or emotional content could be effectively communicated by means of an abstract pictorial language. Indeed, despite the formal and thematic connections that

may be traced between Kline and other artists of his generation, and despite the greater critical attention Kline has received since the I985 retrospective exhibition organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum, critic April Kingsley still felt it necessary to state that the Kline litera ture has essentially dodged the key exegetical issues by largely failing to provide a critical account of "how [his] paintings work, how they convey meaning, and how they relate to other paintings being done at the time by the artist and other peer artists."'2

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CERNUSCHI: Kline's Probst I

Although additional biographical information is now available, and although the artist informed his audience that his works were con ceived in view of evoking specific emotions "translated through the form," I3no convincing theoretical or interpretive framework has emerged by which Kline's interest in mental states may be reconciled

with the type of abstraction he created. This article, therefore, is an attempt to address such problems. My goal is to provide not so much a close reading of Probst I as an interpretive framework and critical terminology whereby an abstraction by Kline such as the painting in the Museum of Fine Arts can be described as a vehicle for meaning and put into context among other images Kline and his contempo raries were creating at the same time. In the process, I will also address the issue of spectator response: how Kline deliberately manip ulates specific formal patterns and arrangements of color in order to affect the viewer's reception of his work. To this end, I will apply recent findings in cognitive science that may contribute to our under standing of how abstract paintings signify and communicate.

Contrast and Contextual Organization

In addressing these interpretive problems, some questions come readily to mind: how should an investigator attempt to construe a spectator's response to a gestural painting such as Probst I, a work

whose configuration of forms displays neither obvious references to the external world nor arbitrary conventions of meaning? How does the act of interpretation proceed? And what frame of reference would a spectator need to establish in order to construe meaning?

Cognitive science and the psychology of perception teach that human beings have a very low tolerance for disorder. When confronted with random markings or chaotic designs, our proclivity is to impose an order or pattern on our perceptions-so much so that we tend to project both structure and meaning (for example, we perceive faces, animal shapes, geometric forms, and so on) even if structure and

meaning do not exist.I4 In fact, our susceptibility to fall prey to optical illusions is a perfect example of our tendency to impose structure and rely on projection during the construction of meaning. On this basis, one may speculate that our perception of abstract art is no different. Even if spectators detect neither visual relationships to observable reality nor references to shared conventions of meaning in abstract art, they will eventually construe structure and meaning, given prolonged exposure and sufficient interest. The question is what kinds of struc tures and what kinds of meanings will the viewer impose?

It may be instructive to begin with the most conspicuous formal pattern Kline chose to manipulate, and the one on which the spectator would most readily focus: value contrast. Although Probst I actually

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contains several passages of color (a yellow triangle appears in the upper right section, a pale peach stroke at the lower left, and several reddish strokes in the upper right and lower left), the painting's visual impact relies predominantly on the opposition of black and white. As noted, this strategy was quite common-and quite deliberate-among artists of the New York School; Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman (I905-I970), Willem de Kooning (born 1904), and Jackson Pollock (I9I2-I956), among others, also relied on the opposi tion of dark and light at specific points in their careers. After Kline's death, Motherwell wrote a homage to his friend, stating that "he and I were independently devoted (among other concepts) to the develop ment of a contemporary 'black and white' painting that has no inter vening middle-tones. An art of opposite weights, and absolute con trast."I5 This particular aspect of Kline's work is often overlooked because the paintings tend to read as black marks on a white ground; consequently, Kline often felt the need to reiterate that "people some times think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it, but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important."'6 Kline's formal strategy, therefore, was not the simple superimposition of black on white but the articulation of formal oppo sitions between the colors. Indeed, an examination of Probst I reveals several instances of white strokes painted over black areas (particularly in the middle-left portion of the canvas).

Again, the idea of composing a picture around formal oppositions was not exclusive to Kline or Motherwell. But if a number of Abstract Expressionists chose to restrict their color scheme, one could specu late that the rationale behind such a restriction was not so much the exclusion of color as the creation of a potent form of contrast. Another member of the New York School, Adolph Gottlieb (I903-I974), described his work specifically in terms of contrast and opposition: "There has to be a conflict. If there is no conflict and the resolution of some sort of opposites, there's no tension and everything is rather

meaningless."I7 Similarly, Rothko spoke of his own paintings as "antitheses" held in "momentary stasis."i8 Kline's restriction of color, in other words, was motivated not by a strategy of exclusion but by a desire (common to artists of his generation) to make contrasts more visually conspicuous, more poignant. White and black may evoke a certain effect in isolation, but when these colors are juxtaposed, the same effect is magnified, and the elements assume greater importance.

Contrast, in fact, is a key aspect of human perception. It is a well known and often demonstrated aspect of the psychology of perception that the same gray shape will have different effects depending on the background against which the shape is set: the shape will appear darker against a light background and lighter against a dark background. The tone of the shape has not changed, but the effects of contrast are such

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as to alter our perception. These effects are not properties inherent to the shape or color on the page, they are part of the spectator's partici pation, of the beholder's share. Indeed, neurophysiologists have re cently identified specific cells in the brain (ganglion cells) whose very function is to enhance our perception of objects that contrast only slightly with their surroundings. These cells fire in such a way when exposed to various stimuli as to help us detect specific objects pre cisely by accentuating contrast and by making the same color appear differently against different backgrounds.I9 Our perception, then, works in terms of establishing relationships, relationships whose mean ings come into sharper relief by means of contrast and juxtaposition.20

Not surprisingly, cognition works in an analogous way. In his stud ies of categorization, for instance, cognitive scientist George Lakoff has found that we tend to neutralize differences among category mem bers and accentuate differences across categories. In effect, categoriza tion works similarly to perception: we overemphasize differences to facilitate cognition.2' While I am not suggesting that Kline or Mother

well knew about the actions of ganglion cells in the brain or of La koff's findings, it is no less important to stress that, in employing a deliberate pictorial strategy of visual contrast, Kline and Motherwell were both relying on basic aspects of our perception and cognition aspects upon which spectators would rely in order to construe mean ing. What we learn from the psychology of perception, then, is the visual and cognitive effectiveness of opposition: black is understood in relation to, and underscored by, the white against which it is contrasted.

Artist and critic Robert Goodnough, who witnessed Kline's working process, remembered that he would move continuously from painting with a brush with black paint to one with white paint: "It was a process of changing often from one to the other so that neither of these two opposites might dominate the other."-22 What Kline is giving us, therefore, is a pictorial image whose general effect and impact is governed by the contrast or opposition of two forces. As spectators, we, in turn, are affected by the activity of our own ganglion cells, and by our own proclivity to accentuate differences, to perceive Kline's work in precisely those terms. As Motherwell put it: "An art of oppo site weights and absolute contrast."23

A close examination of Probst I reveals that Kline manipulated the contrast not only between black and white but also between the blacks themselves. Kline appears to have mixed colors with the black tones so that the gestural strokes on the lower and right-hand side read as brownish-even reddish-black, while, conversely, those on the upper left-hand side of the canvas read as bluish black. Kline thus organized his formal elements in such a way as to exploit both stark (black versus white) and subtle (black versus black) forms of contrast. It would be nearly impossible for a spectator to have detected such

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shifts in coloration were the blacks not directly juxtaposed one against the other. Our very capacity to make such subtle distinctions-to read one black as reddish, or warmer, and another as bluish, or colder-is contingent precisely on their close juxtaposition or contrast.

Once we acknowledge that Kline and a number of Abstract Expres sionist artists chose to implement a visual strategy that coincides

with basic aspects of our perception and cognition, the next questions to ask are why the formal strategy of contrast was so popular, and even more importantly, what did these artists mean to achieve by it? Given the Abstract Expressionists' reluctance to explain their work, we can only speculate as to the answer. Kline himself hardly wrote and rarely spoke about his motivations. And, even if we work under the assumption that the function of Kline's abstractions was to allow "the painter's emotion [to] come across," it is not exactly clear how the painter's emotion can be effectively "translated through the form," i.e., translated through a formal organization of color contrasts.

Since Kline did not articulate how specific emotive states may be effectively transliterated by means of formal relationships on a canvas, it may be helpful to look at Motherwell's writings for clues. This may be a dangerous way to proceed (particularly since Kline and Mother well's paintings are different in many ways, and since it may give the false impression that Kline's and Motherwell's intentions were identi cal), but the comparison is instructive in light of their similar formal interests and in view of Motherwell's own felt affinity with Kline's

work. Kline and Motherwell had more in common than an interest in contrast. Like Kline, Motherwell also saw meaning as a subset of for

mal structure. "It is the medium," he insisted, "or the special configu ration of the medium that . . . brings feeling into being."24 And, again like Kline, Motherwell also saw the opposition of black and white as laden with meaning.

In ig5o, the year Kline and Motherwell met, Motherwell wrote the catalog preface for the exhibition "Black or White: Paintings by European and American Artists," at the Kootz Gallery, in New York (an exhibition, incidentally, in which Kline was not included). Mother

well described the types of associations elicited by the color black. "Ivory black," he wrote, "like bone black, is made from charred bones or horns, carbon black is the result of burned gas.... Sometimes I wonder, laying in a great black stripe on a canvas, what animal's bones (or horns) are making the furrows of my picture.... If the amounts of black or white are right, they will have condensed into quality, into feeling."Z25

Although the meanings Motherwell attaches to the color black were ostensibly affected by the origin and chemistry of the pigments, it cannot be denied that these very connotations coincide with the spe cific associations attached to the color in our particular culture. The

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meanings Motherwell associated with the contrast between black and white, arguably, have as much to do with cultural conventions as with their chemical origins. In our society, it has become customary to think of drastic oppositions, metaphorically, in terms of color con trasts; when we think of two concepts as incompatible or irreconcil able, we often say that their differences are "as clear as black and

white" or "like night and day." It has also become typical to identify black more readily with tragedy or mourning. It is, thus, highly likely that the cognitive strategies and cultural conventions evidenced in these metaphors also filter into the way abstract paintings signify and communicate. When referring to the meanings underlying the con trasts of black and white in his series called Elegy to the Spanish

Republic, begun in I949, Motherwell described them as the contrast between "life and death."26

Without postulating that Kline and Motherwell's meaning inten tions were identical, one may safely assume that the cultural associa tions we attach to the contrast between dark and light affected Kline no less directly than Motherwell. Consequently, when Kline spoke of his paintings as having "a kind of loneliness in a lot of them,"927 one can posit that the emotive resonance the artist detected in individual pieces was not unrelated to the cultural associations we attach to the dominance of either light or dark in a single work (the darker a work, the more "tragic"; the lighter a work, the less "tragic"). And, as I have argued elsewhere with respect to Rothko, the contrasts of light and dark within a painting are as important as the contrasts from painting to painting.28

Although the emotive resonance of Probst I may be difficult to detect at first sight, especially for a first-time spectator who has no point of reference from which to interpret the piece, the spectator's ability to construe meaning would be further enhanced if the painting

were "contextualized," that is, if it were placed together with a num ber of other works whose tonal range revealed more of the artist's expressive repertoire.

For instance, if one includes Probst I within the context of a select group of Kline paintings-say, Painting Number 2 (fig. 2), Mahoning (fig. 3), and Requiem (fig. 4)-one might better situate that individual

painting within the artist's expressive range. Faced with these paint ings, the spectator could construe Painting Number 2 as at the lighter and Requiem as at the darker end of Kline's chromatic scale. In this way, contextual organization helps provide the spectator with an interpretive standard, or a frame of reference, against which the emo tive resonance of an individual painting may be construed. Seen in this light, the general configuration and tonal value of Probst I stands

midway between Mahoning and Requiem: not as dark as Requiem, but darker than Mahoning.

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Fig. 2. Franz Kline, Painting Number 2, 1954.

Oil on canvas, 204.47 X 266.7 cm (80o/2 x I05

in.). Collection, The Museum of Modern Art,

New York; Mr. and Mrs. Joseph H. Hazen and

Mr. and Mrs. Francis F. Rosenbaum Funds.

(Photograph: Geoffrey Clements.)

Fig. 3. Franz Kline, Mahoning, 1956. Oil and

paper collage on canvas, 203.2 X 254 cm (80 x

ioo in.). Collection of Whitney Museum of

American Art, New York; purchase, with funds

from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of

American Art. (Photograph: Geoffrey Clements.) 84_




Fig. 4. Franz Kline, Requiem, 1958. Oil on can

vas, 257.8I X I90.5 cm (IOI 1/2 X 75 in.).

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York;

gift of Seymour H. Knox, I 9 5 9.

It is also in this way that the colors Kline mixes into his blacks

could affect the spectator. For instance, if two paintings display the

same general proportion of light to dark areas, the spectator may be

hard-pressed to detect any emotive difference between them. But if

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evoke a range of associations from his audience. And, as in Probst I, he could even contrast one kind of black against another directly on the same canvas (many of the bluish and reddish black strokes actually overlap one another). If he found the proportions still inadequate, Kline further altered the effect of his formal elements by adding pas sages of color. In Probst I, the yellow triangle in the upper right sec tion of the painting, the reddish strokes in the upper right and lower left, and the peach stroke at the lower left create additional intermedi ary tones (and more subtle forms of visual contrast) than the stark opposition of black and white. In this manner, the inclusion of color provided Kline with an additional expressive tool: a way to decrease the intensity of his contrasts without necessarily reconfiguring the proportion of light to dark areas in his paintings. Motherwell's strategy was no different. Even in predominantly black-and-white paintings such as the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, certain passages of color appear when the artist, presumably, wanted to reduce the full intensity of the chromatic contrasts.

Given the importance of contrast to cognition, as well as the inter pretive assistance contextual organization can provide, it is no sur prise that a number of Abstract Expressionists hoped their paintings would be exhibited in groups. Both Clyfford Still (I904-1980) and Mark Rothko, for example, specifically requested that their works not be exhibited in isolation. The reason, ostensibly, was to help the spectator construe meaning by locating a specific painting's emotive resonance within the organized medium of the artist's expressive range. Willem de Kooning recalled, for instance, how Rothko decided that when he worked in series, his paintings "all got better and that

made him very happy. I never saw him so happy in his life and excited about discovering this: that when he makes them in terms of series like he had a blue one and a red one and a green one, and all of sudden he realizes that the green one has to change a little bit; he then has to change the yellow one and so ... they helped one another."29

Kline himself did not voice explicit concerns about exhibiting works in groups. As a result, it is impossible to determine whether he shared a concern for contextual organization on a par with some of his Ab stract Expressionist contemporaries. On the other hand, he did admit that some of his paintings were "related visually"30 and that it was "nice to paint a happy picture after a sad one,"3I implying that he was not altogether unaware of the potential effects of juxtaposition and contextual organization.32 And given that the Museum of Fine Arts's painting is entitled Probst I-suggesting that Kline may have envi sioned amplifying the work into a sequence (although no such series was actually produced)33 as he did with Mahoning (1956), Mahoning I (ca. 1961), and Mahoning II (ca. 196 1)-it is not altogether farfetched

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to assume that, to some extent, Kline also intuited the importance of context to interpretation.

The idea that works of art are construed around relationships, how ever, and the direct relevance of juxtaposition and contextual organi zation to cognition do have a number of important ramifications for interpretation. Since our reading of Kline's work depends so heavily on situating a given piece along a scale from light to dark, then the mean ing of a Kline painting (or, more accurately, the way a spectator responds to and interprets the painting) will always be context-depen dent and will be predicated, to some degree, on the specific conditions of its exhibition to the public. An individual canvas will be read in terms of the canvases that surround it as well as against the frame of reference, or interpretive background, the spectator has gradually internalized. Consequently, a painting such as Probst I cannot have a single, fixed meaning or emotive resonance existing "on" the canvas, a property existing objectively or outside of a spectator's participation; that meaning or resonance, rather, is "in" the spectator's mind-in the same way as a color's value is also contingent on context and on the beholder's cognitive participation. As the philosopher John Searle so aptly put it: "Meanings are precisely in the head-there is nowhere else for them to be." 34Probst I may have one emotive resonance in one context and a different resonance in another context. As a result, no Kline painting can be said to have a single, unalterable meaning, a meaning that exists in the abstract, independently of a given specta tor's experience of the work in a specific interpretive situation. This is not because Kline's paintings have no meanings; it is because those meanings are predicated on context.

Context, however, may also be supplied by the viewer. If a single Kline is exhibited in isolation, the spectator will create a context in his or her imagination. The spectator will negotiate the meaning of the work against a frame of reference that comprises other works he or she has seen by the same artist, by other artists of the same genera tion, or by artists of the modern period as a whole. The spectator, in addition, will bring an entire range of knowledge and experience to bear on the act of interpretation and will construct meaning against this background of presumptions and postulations-a background that is bound to change from culture to culture and from individual to individual. It is precisely against such kinds of interpretive back grounds that we judge certain works of art as typical or atypical. Even if we make such judgments when confronted with a single work, those judgments are not made in the abstract, but against a whole set of interpretive expectations and prejudgments. Our construction of meaning is always contextual, even when, strictly speaking, context is not available.

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Trajectory and Velocity Tracking

Yet Kline manipulated other formal elements and provided the spec tator with other visual clues to his paintings' meanings in addition to their relative lightness or darkness. Many observers, for example, have described Kline's works (and de Kooning's) in terms of evocations of velocity and speed. In the literature, expressions such as "brutal spon taneous power, "35 "exuding violence, "36 and "energetic swiftness and dynamism"37 often appear. Art historian and critic Harry Gaugh, in perhaps the most extreme version, stated that "Kline made some of the fastest paintings in the history of Abstract Expressionism. Works such as Dahlia (1959-I960), Diamond (I960) and Andrus (1I96I) speed by; their masses accelerate as black strokes and color zones zoom across and into space."38

But the sensations of velocity and speed viewers often feel before a gestural painting are essentially no different than those they experi ence in the changing values of colored shapes relative to their back ground. Since paintings are static rather than kinetic, they cannot be "fast," "swift," or "dynamic"; they can provide only the effect of being so. Sensations of velocity and speed are experiential facts, not objective facts: they do not exist "on" the canvas but in the specta tor's mind. Before a Kline abstraction, spectators tend to read the strokes on the painting as direct traces of the artist's gestures on the canvas surface. As a result, viewers reconstruct, in their imagination, the physical movements they assume were necessary to create the

marks they detect on the painting. But those assumptions are often wrong. Art historian Robert Gold

water warned that, when perusing Abstract Expressionist paintings, one should not be taken in by appearances. "Each of Kline's paint ings," he wrote, "seems the spontaneous, unretouched record of an impulsive mood noted in broad confident strokes, quick in their appli cation, sure in their placement and relation. Yet Kline rarely worked in this fashion and only a few pictures were executed at one sitting.

Most of the canvases are actually the final result of long study, of adjustment, with edges shifted back and forth and areas painted and repainted until the artist was satisfied that he had achieved the right relation of form."39 Kline himself admitted that "some of the pictures I work on a long time and they look as if I've knocked them out ... and there are other pictures that come off right away. The immediacy can be accomplished in a picture that's been worked on for a long time just as well as if it's done rapidly. "4O And fellow Abstract Expressionist Philip Guston (1913-1980) also remembered that Kline would spend "days or weeks reworking the edge of a stroke to give the impression that it had been painted with intensity and 6lan."4'

Therefore, even if the physical sensations we construe before gestural

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abstractions are the result of mistaken assumptions-even if the paintings reproduce the effect of speed, not literal speed-these effects were both deliberate and calculated. Kline's own description of his working process suggests that he was not only fully cognizant of the kinetic effects evoked by his paintings, but that he actively sought them: "I can begin a painting if I decide it would be nice to have a large triangle come up and meet something that goes across like this....

The triangle needs an area that goes this way and then at the top something falls down and hits about here and goes over there [italics

mine].'/42 According to his dealer Sidney Janis, Kline even referred to the activity of painting over black areas with white as "cutting into."43 Kline's use of terms such as "come up," "going across," "falls down," "hits and goes over there," and "cutting into" suggests how conscious he was of the effects of velocity evoked by the gestural strokes on his canvases.

In and of themselves, of course, suggestions of velocity and speed, even in conjunction with the opposition of color, can hardly function as an effective vehicle for meaning. What Kline's description reveals is that he sought, not just effects of energy and dynamism, but to arrange or compose these effects in such a manner as to affect the spec tator in particular ways. Kline did not simply mean to evoke physical sensations; his gestures were carefully organized in specific arrange

ments to manipulate his own (as well as the audience's) reactions, reactions that were most likely related to, and motivated by, some form of emotional projection. "A curve line or rhythmical relationship," Kline insisted, "do[es] have, in some way, some psychological bear ing, not only on the person who looks at them after they have been conceived but also they do have a lot to do with the creative being

who is involved with wondering just how exciting it can be."44 Cer tain forms, he continued, "have a brooding quality, whereas in other forms, they could be called or considered happier.... What I try to do is to create the painting so that the overall thing has that particular emotion. "4

Therefore, although specific gestures evoke sensations of velocity and speed, it is by way of construing their overall configuration that the viewer confers an emotive resonance onto them. It is not the sin gle gesture, but the overall composition that counts. But how, one

may ask, does composition affect emotive response? The answer to this question is again closely tied to evidence recently assimilated in the cognitive sciences. Whenever we follow a line in a Kline abstrac tion, we engage in what cognitive scientists call trajectory tracking: a tendency to follow and focus on moving objects and to move our heads to keep those objects centered.46 The types of movements and adjustments we make in order to synchronize our movements with those of the moving object help us to infer its trajectory and velocity.

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As a result, if we have such a propensity to follow moving objects with our eyes (or lines on a painting to which we attribute velocity and speed), then different compositional arrangements inevitably yield different visual sensations. Lines that repeat similar movements and directions could suggest greater physical stability and reinforcement; conversely, lines meeting from opposite directions would suggest greater physical tension, collision, or struggle.

In the same way that Kline could manipulate the contrast of light and dark in multiple variations and from one pole to the other-for example, from Painting Number 2 to Mahoning, Probst I, and Requiem-he could also suggest reinforcement or collision in a variety of ways and in varying degrees. The intersection of gestures at right or near-right angles would give a composition an effect of greater rest and stability, while multiple thrusts and counterthrusts colliding at vari ous angles, as in Probst I, create an effect of heightened tension and struggle. In addition, when Kline decides to differentiate his strokes by using warmer versus colder blacks (again, as seen in Probst I), the sen sation of conflict is exacerbated further, particularly when compared to other paintings where the blacks tend to be more uniform. Thus,

while Kline did not often speak about matters related to art theory, it is not surprising that he did, on occasion, relate his own paintings to

Hans Hofmann's (I880-I966) concept of "push and pull,"47 an attempt to create suggestions of movement, of thrust and counterthrust, in

works of art. As a result, even if at first sight a Kline painting such as Probst I

reveals no connection to conventional systems of meaning (displaying no obvious similarities to the external world or to preestablished sym bolic or allegorical codes), an observer may, nonetheless, construe an interpretive frame of reference from a variety of visual clues: value contrasts, perceived effects of directionality and velocity, and the gen eral configuration according to which these effects are organized. Con sequently, no two paintings are identical or have the same expressive resonance. That resonance must be construed by the individual spec tator in direct confrontation with the work-a construal, moreover, that will be contingent on the viewer's own cultural associations and presumptions about the work itself, on the context in which the viewer sees the work, on the viewer's capacity to infer the physical move

ments necessary to produce the work, and on the way all those sensa tions are organized by the general configuration of the piece.

Thus, because the reading of a canvas such as Probst I is predicated on a variety of experiential effects, that reading cannot exist indepen dently of the spectator's active physical participation in the act of cog nition. Our interpretations are contingent on our physical sensations, on our own propensity to interpret inert and static lines on a canvas as if they were infused with kinetic energy, and on the associations we

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attach to effects of structure versus collision. These are not associa tions that we bring to our interpretations a posteriori in order to rein force a foregone conclusion; on the contrary, these are associations

without which interpretation simply would not occur. If the sensations of velocity and speed exist, as do those of color

contrast, in the spectator's mind rather than "on" the canvas, so too do the effects of reinforcement and collision generated by the compo sitional configuration of given paintings. These are aspects of our response that cannot be described independently of the activity of a sentient perceiver involved in the construction of meaning. It is, in

my view, for this reason that Kline (and many of his Abstract Expres sionist contemporaries) referred to the activity of looking at a picture as an "experience," an experience that can be translated verbally only at great cost.

But even if Kline's abstractions can be described in terms of the physical sensations of velocity and speed that a spectator would, most likely, construe before his canvases, it still is not exactly clear how these physical sensations translate into the various moods or emotional experiences that Kline himself described as motivating his artistic decisions. After all, physical experiences are quite different from psy chological experiences. To Kline, however, they need not have been antithetical. When he spoke of creating a painting so that it possessed a "particular emotion," that same emotion, he insisted, was "an expe rience translated through the form."48 The emotive resonance of a painting thus correlates to its formal organization and to the way this organization elicits specific effects in the spectator.

Consequently, the final issue I will address is how a spectator's physical sensations before a Kline abstraction such as Probst I (effects of velocity and speed and the reinforcement or collision of trajectories)

may be interpreted in the altogether different terms of emotional states. Although Kline made his own belief about the congruity of form and meaning unambiguously clear, what is less clear is how the physical experience of perusing abstract shapes and colors can trans late itself into an emotional experience. The interpretive question at hand, then, hinges on how relationships of meaning can be established between physical and psychological experiences in Abstract Expres sionist paintings.

A way to approach this issue lies in examining those transitional works that specifically led to the development of Kline's mature, ab stract style. Although the significance attributed to the event varies from scholar to scholar, it is widely recognized that Kline's introduc tion to the possibility of enlarging an image with a Bell Opticon (for

which de Kooning is credited)49 had important ramifications both for his move toward abstraction and his general concern with scale.50

What was less well known, however, until Harry Gaugh pointed it out,

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was that the images Kline first decided to enlarge were near-abstract studies of his wife in a rocking chair (fig. 5). And although Kline had

made numerous such studies of his wife, Elizabeth (a woman suffering from depression and eventually confined to an institution), Gaugh reads some of these studies as anticipating the hallmarks of Kline's abstract style: "Black strokes cut across the body," he writes, "not as descriptive details but as carriers of intense feeling. Regarding these drawings from a strictly formalistic viewpoint blocks their meaning in the context of Kline's . .. attempts to cope with Elizabeth as subject and wife while her disintegrating personality pulled her farther and farther away from him. By I948 the rocking chair was transformed by slashing strokes."5' According to Gaugh, Elizabeth's illness had a direct impact on the formal development of Kline's work. In Dancer at Islip (fig. 6)-Elizabeth was a dancer, and Islip was the location of the hospital where she was interned-a gray silhouette is separated from the spectator by an armature of thick, black lines whose propor tions and configurations are highly reminiscent of Kline's mature abstractions.

On this account, Kline instigated his gestural style as a response to a personal event. And when the Bell Opticon enlarged the images, one

may posit that Kline intuited that if expressive force increases as scale is magnified, the same force does not decrease when the figural refer ence is lost. Although Gaugh's interpretation of these important tran sitional works is persuasive, and although bringing this biographical information to bear on interpretive ventures is a welcome addition to the Kline literature, his reading of the later abstractions remains too dependent on obfuscated figural representation.

As April Kingsley put it: "Even though [Gaughl tells us that Kline's titles were applied to the [abstract] paintings after the fact by com

mittee, and half by chance at the time of their installation in the gal lery rather than in the studio, he feels no compunctions about using them to read images into these abstractions and to imply iconographic significance in their use."52 Indeed, although Kline himself did not deny the possibility that figural associations might be attached to his abstractions, he nevertheless warned: "I'm not painting bridge con structions, skyscrapers or laundry tickets ... I don't paint objectively ... I don't paint a given object-a figure or a table; I paint an organization that becomes a painting. If you look at an abstraction, you can imag ine that it's a head, a bridge, almost anything-but it's not these things that get me started on a painting."53

It is the emotive impact of the work's formal configuration, not its correlation to observable empirical experience, that makes abstraction a vehicle for meaning. This is not to suggest, however, that titles are completely irrelevant to interpretation-only that titles, when at tached to paintings after the fact, reveal the emotive associations the

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41

Fig. S. Franz Kline, Woman in Rocking Chair,

1946. Ink on paper, 20.96 x 17.78 cm (8 '/4 x

7 in.). Collection of Richard E. and Jane M.

Lang, Medina, Washington. (Photograph: Paul

Macapia.)

Fig. 6. Franz Kline, Untitled (Dancer at Islip), I1949. Casein on paper, 26.04 x I19.05 cm (xIO 3/4

x 7 '/2 in.). The Harry W. and Mary Margaret

Anderson Collection, Menlo Park, California.




work elicits from the artist after the work has been completed, not a representational subject matter the artist had sought to represent from the outset. On this account, the title of Probst I, which is a reference to Joachim Probst (19I3-1967), a painter Kline befriended in Green

wich Village in the 1940S, suggests that the painting's general configu ration and mood reminded Kline of his friend-not that Kline painted the work in view of representing the appearance, or a portrait, of Probst.54 But this is not to imply that the title is insignificant. It is worth noting that Probst's work, being generally of a religious nature and tending toward thick applications of paint and a dark color scheme, was highly influenced by Rembrandt (I606-I669). On one level, then, Kline may have associated Probst I with his friend because its predominantly dark colors, and touch of yellow, reminded him of Probst's pictures. On another level, and in view of Gaugh's premise that Kline may have instigated his gestural style as a response to the

mental state of another human being, it is also possible that Kline found the general configuration of Probst I, and its overall mood, to be reminiscent of his friend's disposition. Probst led a tragic life; he was often depressed, even suicidal.55 Given that Kline's painting stands at the darker end of his chromatic scale, one may hypothesize that Kline titled the piece after his friend precisely because its dark colors coin cided with Kline's own impression of Probst's emotional makeup. As a result, Kline found the title appropriate, not because the painting was

meant as a portrait, but because, on one level, the color scheme of his work may have reminded Kline of Probst's paintings and, on another, because its general mood seemed in keeping with his own sense of his friend's personality.

In stressing the degree to which a painting's title or meaning may be construed by the artist after completion, I do not deny the relevance of Kline's early sketches to the development of the mature abstractions, or the impact of his wife's illness on the progression of his gestural style. But, in my view, Kline's abstractions signify and communicate in terms of the physical sensations they produce, not in terms of some detectable similarity to objects in the external world. Gaugh, curiously, was arguing along the same lines when he described the kinetic effects of Kline's gestural style and when he wrote about "black strokes" cutting "across the body, not as descriptive details but as carriers of intense feeling." Yet, when it came to interpreting the later abstractions,

Gaugh did not push the implications of these statements further. Con trary to the artist's statements, Gaugh could not conceive of physical sensations as meaningful independently of some figural reference. As a result, he looked to Kline's titles as direct clues to their meaning. And, although physical sensations are not the only variables at work in Kline's construction of meaning, I disagree with Gaugh because, in my view, these physical sensations become meaningful, not by recalling

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visual aspects of the external world, but insofar as they are susceptible to metaphorical projection.

Metaphorical Projection

Metaphorical projection is an important concept, and it requires clarification. Cognitive linguists have recently posited that the termi nology we use to describe intellectual or emotional states is directly extrapolated from expressions denoting physical experience. Eve Sweetser, for example, has argued that there is "a general tendency to borrow concepts and vocabulary from the more accessible physical and social world to refer to the less accessible worlds of reasoning, emotion, and conversational structure."56 Terms such as "to grasp," "to seize," or "to capture" were first used to designate physical tasks: for example, to grasp an object, to seize an individual, to capture an animal. But, as languages became progressively more refined and sophisticated, the same terms extended their meanings to denote psy chological states as well as physical tasks. As a result, English has developed metaphorical expressions such as "grasp a meaning," "seize an opportunity," and "capture an expression."

The same is true of emotional states. According to Sweetser, the "equation of the physical self and the inner self is pervasive in English and in the Indo-European family at large."'57 Consequently, we also have a proclivity to think of emotions in physical terms: "expressing" or "re pressing" emotions; "keeping" feelings "inside" or "letting them out"; "bursting into" tears or "exploding with" anger, and so on. Metaphor allows the possibility of transferring aspects from one kind of experi ence (physical) to another (nonphysical).58 On this account, metaphor is more than simply a figure of speech. It is one of the most basic ways by which human beings understand the world and construct meaning.

In the same way, the physical effects of velocity and speed experi enced before a Kline abstraction such as Probst I may suggest psycho logical states in the way that metaphors apply the terminology of physical experience to psychological experience. Another aspect of metaphorical projection that is pertinent to our discussion of Kline's canvas is our propensity to conceive of speech acts and mental states in terms of journeys through space.59 Metaphorical expressions such as "how many of these ideas have we covered," "how far have we got ten on this problem," "you still have a long way to go before you reach your goal," and so on, suggest the degree to which mental achievements or goals are understood in terms of physical paths or tra jectories. Analogously, the physical conditions underlying those paths or trajectories-whether they are clear or obstructed, long or short, easy or hard-apply to mental as well as to physical situations. Meta phorical expressions such as "I am home free," "I can see the light at

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the end of the tunnel," and "I'm on the right track" denote freedom and clarity of purpose; others, such as "I kept getting side-tracked," "I was forced to deviate from my original plan," and "there's a ceiling on advancement in this firm," denote how emotional or professional frustrations can be expressed in terms of physical barriers or deflected paths. We think of freedom and possibility in terms of clear paths and of restriction and difficulty in terms of blocked and restricted paths.

In the same way, the sensations Kline's works evoke in the specta tor may be physical (such as the feeling of velocity and speed, rein forcement or collision) but their physicality does not preclude the

works from communicating an intellectual or emotional meaning. Given our proclivity for metaphorical projection and our tendency to express the less-than-tangible mental or emotional world in terms of physical correlates, it is my contention that Kline's work signifies and communicates in the same way as many of our linguistic expressions do: by using the physical as a metaphor for the psychological. Our placement of a given painting along the dark and light scale provides a way of construing emotive meaning, while our physical experience of colliding trajectories engages the process of metaphorical projection. By means of metaphor, we can read the physical sensations of conflict and violence evoked by Kline's abstractions as evoking emotive states.

This is not to imply that metaphorical projections will always be predictable or remain identical. If we refer to two entities as "being in conflict," we will assume that the relationship between them is antag onistic. But, beyond that, this knowledge will not necessarily reveal what the exact natures of those two entities are. Similarly, although the formal configuration of Probst I suggests physical sensations of antagonism or violence, and although those same sensations are sus ceptible to metaphorical projection, the nature of these projections is not completely predetermined by the formal configurations them selves. Both freedom and constraint influence our interpretations: although the effect of conflict and struggle is somewhat constrained by the way we tend to construe gestural paintings, the projections we establish on the basis of these effects is far less so. Our proclivity toward velocity and trajectory tracking will make us read Kline's painting in terms of speed and violence (no one, as far as I know, has ever read such a work as tranquil or static), but what this violence specifically refers to remains open to interpretation. For Kline, the sensations of pictorial violence evidenced in his work may initially have provided a means to respond to the internal mental struggle of his wife, and may have eventually shifted to his own mental state or to another subject (such as that of Joachim Probst) whose nature Kline himself saw as conflicted and contradictory.

But the spectator, in turn, is free to read the pictorial tension and

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violence in any number of altogether different (yet equally metaphori cal) ways. Each, or any, of these interpretations may be sustained by an individual interpreter because, at some basic level, any interpreta tion that refers to conflict or struggle will correspond to our visual experience of the work. The interpretations we will most resist-those

we find unconvincing or simply counterintuitive-are those that will run counter to our physical sensations. If, for instance, a critic were to interpret Probst I as a metaphor for things harmonious and peaceful, such a reading would no doubt draw considerable disagreement. But, so long as an interpretation connects the painting to things violent or dynamic, a critic could always point to aspects of the work to sustain his or her reading. Our physical experience, then, provides a basis by which we gauge the persuasiveness of interpretation, even if the meta phorical projections stemming from this basis may vary considerably. Consequently, the interpretation of meaning in gestural paintings (as in linguistic metaphors) cannot be divorced from the physical experi ence of the individuals construing and interpreting meaning.

Kline's Probst I, like many abstract paintings, may be a difficult image to interpret in isolation. Without conspicuous visual references to the external world or allusions to a preestablished allegorical or symbolic code that can be readily identified, the spectator may find it difficult to establish an interpretive frame of reference from which to construe meaning. But, on the basis of contextual organization, of locating the painting within the scale of the artist's expressive range, and of the physical sensations construed in the work, the viewer, by virtue of metaphorical projection, may construct an entire set of criti cal presumptions and postulations against which gestural abstraction can function as a vehicle for meaning. These assumptions and postula tions are, of course, contingent on one's ideological allegiances and invariably change from interpreter to interpreter. If one assumes that abstraction is an attempt to achieve a pictorial state of pure form, an idiom divorced from issues of subject matter and meaning, then the elements discussed in this article (value contrasts, trajectory tracking, compositional configuration, and metaphorical projection) will have no interpretive relevance whatsoever. On the other hand, and from another point of view, these elements form the basis for an alternative approach to Abstract Expressionism, an approach that takes issues of signification and communication as central to any interpretive ven ture, and an approach that incorporates rather than excludes the activ ity of the spectator in the construction of meaning.

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Notes

I would like to thank a number of people whose help, advice, and support have been

invaluable during the preparation of this article:

Anne L. Poulet, Russell B. and Andr?e

Beauchamp Steams Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum

of Fine Arts, Boston; Fredrica A. Harvey, Publications Department, Museum of Fine

Arts, Boston; Lee Sorensen, Head, Lilly Library, Duke University; Margarita G. Laughlin,

Registrar, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg,

Florida; Mary Ellen Goeke, Registrar, and Karen

Zamiska of the Cincinnati Art Museum; William Broom, Associate Slide Curator, Duke

University; and L. Susan Forster.

i. Probst I was purchased from Sidney Janis, Kline's dealer, in January 1962 by Susan Morse

Hilles, who gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts

in 1973. It was the first painting by Kline to

enter the Museum's collection.

2. See Eugene Goosen, "The Big Canvas," in

The New Art, Gregory Battcock, ed. (New York:

Dutton, 1973), 57-65. See also Clement Green

berg, "The Crisis of the Easel Picture," in Art

and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 154

157. In addition, see Harold Rosenberg, "The

American Action Painters," Art News 51 (Decem ber 1952): 22.

3. See Lawrence Alloway, "Signs and Surface:

Notes on Black and White Painting in New

York," Quadrum 9 (i960): 49-62.

4. On this issue, see Ann Gibson, "Abstract

Expressionism's Evasion of Language," Art

Journal 47 (fall 1988): 208-214.

5. Franz Kline as quoted in John Baur, ed., The

New Decade (New York: Whitney Museum of

American Art, 1955), 8.

6. Mark Rothko as quoted in Katherine Kuh, "Mark

Rothko," Art Institute of Chicago Quarterly 48

(November 1954): 68. Similar statements were

also made by Clyfford Still. See Still's comments

in Patricia Still's "Clyfford Still: Biography," in

Thomas Kellein, ed., Clyfford Still: 1904-1980

(Munich: Prestel, 1992), 163: "To supplement the

reproductions of paintings shown in this cata

logue with written comments by the painter rep resents not only the extreme of temerity on my

part?it is patently presumptuous.... In a culture

where the written word is commonly regarded as

synonymous with God, the gesture suggests an

arrogance pregnant with blasphemy."

7. See Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in

Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradic

tion in Social Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1979), 5.

8. Franz Kline as quoted in Seiden Rodman, Con

versations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair,

1957), 106.

9- Franz Kline, interviewed by David Sylvester, in

Clifford Ross, ed., Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics (New York: Abrams, 1990),

98, 99.

10. Mark Rothko as quoted in Rodman, Conver

sations, 93.

11. Robert Motherwell as quoted in Ross, Abstract

Expressionism, 103.

12. April Kingsley, "Franz Kline: Out of Sight, Out of Mind," Arts Magazine 60 (May 1986): 41.

13. Franz Kline as quoted in Ross, Abstract

Expressionism, 99.

14. See Carolyn Bloomer, Principles of Visual

Perception (New York: Design Press, 1990), 13;

also Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1974), and Ernst

Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972).

15. Robert Motherwell, "Homage to Franz Kline," in Harry Gaugh, Franz Kline: The Color

Abstractions (Washington, D.C.: The Phillips

Collection, 1979), 43. The statement continues:

"I viewed his version with profound respect and

admiration, and often was deeply moved. He

really understood that modern art can have no

truck with sentiments for the past. Instead, mod

ern art's function is to make our present existence

known to each other."

16. Franz Kline, interviewed by Katherine Kuh, in

Ross, Abstract Expressionism, 92-93.

17. Adolph Gottlieb as quoted in Jeanne Seigel,

"Adolph Gottlieb: Two Views," Arts Magazine 52

(February 1968): 31.

18. Mark Rothko as quoted in William Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1983), 102.

19. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, "Phototransduction and

Information Processing in the Retina," in Eric

Kandel and James Schwartz, eds., Principles of Neural Science (New York: Elsevier, 1991), 411.1 would like to thank Alison Stuebe for bringing this reference to my attention.

20. See Wolfgang K?ler, Gestalt Psychology (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1929),

167-168; see also Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 50.

21. See George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dan

gerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the

Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987),

52.

22. Robert Goodnough, "Kline Paints a Picture," Art News 51 (December 1952): 38.

23. Robert Motherwell in Gaugh, Color Abstrac

tions, 43.

24. Robert Motherwell, "Beyond the Aesthetic," in Ross, Abstract Expressionism, 104.

25. Robert Motherwell as quoted in Stephanie

Terenzio, The Collected Writings of Robert

Motherwell (New York: Oxford University Press,

1992), 72.

26. Robert Motherwell as quoted in "Robert

Motherwell: The Elegies to the Spanish Repub

lic," in E. A. Carmean, ed., American Art at Mid

Century, exhib. cat., National Gallery of Art

(Washington, D.C, 1978), 101.

27. See Ross, Abstract Expressionism, 98.

28. Claude Cernuschi, "Communication Without

Conventions?: Reading Rothko's Abstractions," Source: Notes in the History of Art XI (spring/sum

mer 1992): 65-69. See also Ernst Gombrich,

"Expression and Communication," in Medi

tations on a Hobby Horse (London: Phaidon,

1971), 56-69.

29. Willem de Kooning, "On Mark Rothko," in

Willem de Kooning: Collected Writings (Madras and New York: Hanuman Books, 1988), 187-188.

30. Ross, Abstract Expressionism, 95.

31. Ibid., 98.

32. In an interesting anecdote, Harry Gaugh related

that "in 1961, in a return to figurative drawing after working abstractly for more than ten years, he drew for a girlfriend on the two sides of a menu

his two sides?one laughing, the other long faced

and sad" [Franz Kline: The Vital Gesture, [New York: Abbeville, 1985], 13-14).

33. Paintings Department files, Museum of Fine

Arts, Boston.

34. John Searle, Intentionality: An Essay on the

Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1983), 200.

35. John Gordon, Franz Kline 1910-1962, exhib.

cat., Whitney Museum of American Art (New

York, 1968), n.p.

36. Fielding Dawson, An Emotional Memoir of Franz Kline (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 76.

37. Kingsley, "Franz Kline," 43.

38. Harry Gaugh, "Franz Kline: The Man and the

Myth," Art News 84 (December 1985): 62.

39. Robert Goldwater, "Franz Kline: Darkness

Visible," Art News 66 (March 1967): 40.


41. Gaugh, "Franz Kline: The Man and the

Myth," 62.

42. Ross, Abstract Expressionism, 96. In An

Emotional Memoir of Franz Kline (New York:

Pantheon, 1967), 10-11, Fielding Dawson remem

bered arguing with Kline over whether one of his

painting's general orientation was vertical or hori

zontal: "He stepped to the painting and starting from the bottom right corner, his hands followed

the slanting vertical upsweep, halting in the cen

ter to bend and make his arms horizontal paral

lels, which he broke away, and then his hands

continued to the angular rise to the left-hand cor

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Museum of Fine Arts, Boston VOL. 6, I994

ner. He looked at me. His head was cocked. He

said it was a vertical painting."

43. Harry Gaugh, "Franz Kline's Romantic Ab

straction," Artforum 13 (summer 1975): 36.

44. Ross, Abstract Expressionism, 97-98.

45. Ibid., 99.

46. See Ulrich Neisser's Cognition and Reality

(New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1976),

38.

47. Gaugh, "Franz Kline's Romantic Abstraction," 28.


49. A Bell Opticon is an instrument that can mag

nify the appearance of a sheet of paper or drawing and then project that magnified image onto a wall.

For the influence of the Bell Opticon on Kline, see

Gaugh, The Vital Gesture, 84-85; and Elaine de

Kooning, "Franz Kline: Painter of His Own Life," Art News 61 (November 1962): 67-68.

50. For example, Kline stated: "I think the presence of a large painting is quite different from that of a

small one. A small one can have as much scale,

vigor, space, but I like to paint the large ones.

There's an excitement about the larger areas, and

I think you confront yourself much more with a

big canvas" (Ross, Abstract Expressionism, 94).

51. Gaugh, The Vital Gesture, 43.

52. Kingsley, "Franz Kline," 41.


54. Letter from Stephen E. Weil, of the Marl

borough-Gerson Gallery, Inc., dated June 28, 1967, addressed to Lucretia H. Giese of the Museum of

Fine Arts, Boston, concerning the title of the MFA's

piece. According to Weil, the painting "was never

meant for him [Probst] but simply that Kline

liked the sound of his name and used it for the

title" (Paintings Department files, Museum of

Fine Arts, Boston).

55. In a personal statement dated February 8,

1966, Probst wrote: "I have no biographys [sic]. . .

I was born into sorrow on Sept. ist and died in

despair on Sept. 2nd 1913.1 cut my wrists in 1939. I drank arsenick [sic] in 1950.1 starved for 25

years and when hungry I ate my tongue. My mother committed suicide in 1930 and my father

died with a broken heart on the bowery. I never

had a happy day in my life and hope to go insane.

Yea, not even the angels of destruction have grace in mein [sic] presence" (artist's file, Museum of

Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida. I would like to

thank Margarita G. Laughlin, Museum Registrar, for bringing this information to my attention).

56. Eve Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics:

Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic

Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1990), 31.

57. Ibid., 31.

58. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Meta

phors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1980).

59. Ibid.

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a cognitive approach to abstract expressionism

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