Last updated: September 12, 2023
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Podcast 133: Analyzing Art Materials Used by Franz Kline
Who Was Franz Kline?
Image Courtesy of Cory Rogge
Cory Rogge: Dr. Corina Rogge or Cory Rogge. I'm the Andrew W. Mellon Research Scientist at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Menil Collection.
Catherine Cooper: Thank you for joining us.
Cory Rogge: It's a pleasure.
Catherine Cooper: Could you talk a bit about Franz Kline and why his art is so important?
Cory Rogge: So Franz Kline, who was born in 1910 and passed away in 1962, was one of what's often known as the big three of abstract expressionist artists. So he was considered on par with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and yet when you go to the literature and look at him, there's not very much written about him. So while you might walk into a gallery, a museum and see his art, there's not really a lot known about him. And so we saw him as important both for the reason that his art's hanging on walls and should be studied.
It hasn't yet been studied, but also to try to bring his name back into the fold, to have him be recognized as an artist on par with these artists and others of his time, like Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston. We started the book with the nucleus of our own collection here at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, where we have four paintings and an ink sketch on paper by Kline. And as we began looking at artworks, we realized that they were all different. They were all aging differently. They were all made with similar materials, but he was using them in different ways. And we decided that we just couldn't understand our own works without extrapolating, without going to other works. And our works were from what we would consider his mature periods. So from 1950 to 1961 is our latest. And yet how did his early training impact how he was working later on?
Collaborative Inquiry
Cory Rogge: And so we began reaching out to other institutions who held works by Kline in their collections. And that included the National Gallery of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Harvard Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, and asking if we could come visit and look at them. And what was really amazing was that even though some of these museums have conservation scientists on staff like myself, not all of them do. And even the ones that did, they're overworked. They don't have enough time and bandwidth to look at or do all of the work that's requested of them themselves. And so we were met basically with open arms where these institutions came to us and said, "Look, take the samples you want, do the analysis you want. Tell us what you find, but please take this opportunity to help the field, to help us and to help yourself."
So it was really gracious and welcoming. And then at The Metropolitan Museum of Art where we were looking at more paintings by Kline, they had a greater concentration, including some of his early works from the 1930s and 1940s. Their scientists were actually able to work with us, and so they did the sampling and collected the data, and then we collaboratively analyzed it together and it really created a richer experience because we were finding things in Kline's works that we didn't understand and just the ability to talk that over with a colleague, "I'm seeing this. What are you seeing? Are we crazy? Is this an artifact," really deepened the research and led to new avenues of research and new findings that went up beyond Kline himself.
It was a really wonderful chance we got to visit all these institutions. We got to make new friends out of people that we had only maybe known slightly before. It was great. And that's the wonder of conservation and conservation science, which is that we're kind of all in there for the objects and it's just a very collaborative and welcoming community. It's easy to write an article about maybe one artwork or two, and I've written papers on things that have hundreds of samples, but here we were telling not only a story about his materials, but his materials through time, and then also trying to contextualize him in his time period. So how he worked compared to his friends and colleagues who were also working in New York at the time.
So it was really gracious and welcoming. And then at The Metropolitan Museum of Art where we were looking at more paintings by Kline, they had a greater concentration, including some of his early works from the 1930s and 1940s. Their scientists were actually able to work with us, and so they did the sampling and collected the data, and then we collaboratively analyzed it together and it really created a richer experience because we were finding things in Kline's works that we didn't understand and just the ability to talk that over with a colleague, "I'm seeing this. What are you seeing? Are we crazy? Is this an artifact," really deepened the research and led to new avenues of research and new findings that went up beyond Kline himself.
It was a really wonderful chance we got to visit all these institutions. We got to make new friends out of people that we had only maybe known slightly before. It was great. And that's the wonder of conservation and conservation science, which is that we're kind of all in there for the objects and it's just a very collaborative and welcoming community. It's easy to write an article about maybe one artwork or two, and I've written papers on things that have hundreds of samples, but here we were telling not only a story about his materials, but his materials through time, and then also trying to contextualize him in his time period. So how he worked compared to his friends and colleagues who were also working in New York at the time.
A Deeper Understanding of the Abstract Expressionists
Cory Rogge: Then also in doing this research, we realized that there were so many myths surrounding the abstract expressionists. Everybody thinks that they worked like the famous Han Namath movie of Jackson Pollock, which makes it look like he's just kind of almost randomly applying paint to a canvas. And so there was this idea that abstract artists encounter a canvas and painting is all action. It's all un-premeditated, and that leads the public to the idea that this is slap dash. This is easy, that it's something a child could do. And what we were seeing in Kline's work was so antithetical to that idea. His works were carefully planned out. He did do sketches and he worked from them. He very carefully considered his composition, and that's what gives his word a striking power that they have when you look at them in the galleries. Most of them are black and white.
Most of them involve brushstroke lines, but they are so carefully composed that there's tension and balance and it's really difficult to do something that way. And so all of these things combined, the science, the art history, the contextualization, the myth busting meant that it was just too big for a research paper. And we really felt that to give him and our findings their due, we needed to make it into a book. One of the things that we were struck most about with Kline's works are the variety of condition issues that they have. So they can vary from the very simple, like his early paintings were largely small, but he moved a lot. So he moved studio to studio to studio. As he kept getting evicted, they'd tear down the place he was living, and that resulted in just sheer physical dents and dings to his artwork.
Most of them involve brushstroke lines, but they are so carefully composed that there's tension and balance and it's really difficult to do something that way. And so all of these things combined, the science, the art history, the contextualization, the myth busting meant that it was just too big for a research paper. And we really felt that to give him and our findings their due, we needed to make it into a book. One of the things that we were struck most about with Kline's works are the variety of condition issues that they have. So they can vary from the very simple, like his early paintings were largely small, but he moved a lot. So he moved studio to studio to studio. As he kept getting evicted, they'd tear down the place he was living, and that resulted in just sheer physical dents and dings to his artwork.
Materials Degrade
Cory Rogge: So we've seen some of that. Later on in his works, he begins using a lot of zinc white paint, and a lot of artists still do, and a lot of artists his contemporaries did. So it's very common. But the problem with zinc white paints is that the zinc in the pigment can react with the oil binder and make what are known as fatty acids. So zinc bound to a fatty acid from the oil. And this is in some ways good. Metals can promote drying of oils, give you a nice film. But these soaps can also migrate through the paint layers and then form laminar layers in between different colors of paint layers, or they can conglomerate into little almost ovoid or spherical pustules.
It's kind of a painting acne and lead paints do this as well, and zinc soaps in particular then if they are forming little pustules, they can spall the surface paints off. If they are forming laminates, these flat plainer films, they can cause paint layers to split apart so that you'll lose the upper paint layers and leave only the bottom most paint layers behind. And they also make paint films more brittle. So paint we think of when it's dried as being hard, but it actually is a little bit plastic. It can respond to mechanical changes to dimensional changes of the canvas or to the panel support caused by temperature and relative humidity. But if the paint film becomes too brittle and it can't do that, it just cracks.
So we have zinc soap problems in Kline's paintings. And to be fair, not all zinc soaps are bad. So it's the films and the pustules that are bad. But zinc soaps that are just kind of hanging out there mixed in with the paint layer themselves can be perfectly fine. So we have a painting, Corinthian II, which has zinc soaps, but they're dispersed throughout the paint film and it's in perfect condition. But we have other paintings where we're getting these films and then that's causing issues because we're losing flakes of paint. But then there are other problems like Kline used in some cases, paints that were under bound that have too much pigment relative to media, and that produces a paint film that's very coarse and brittle. It's almost like sand. It just wants to fall apart, and that's not very good for it. So most of the time when he kind of knew what he was doing when he painted let's say straightforwardly, his paintings are thin for the most part.
It's kind of a painting acne and lead paints do this as well, and zinc soaps in particular then if they are forming little pustules, they can spall the surface paints off. If they are forming laminates, these flat plainer films, they can cause paint layers to split apart so that you'll lose the upper paint layers and leave only the bottom most paint layers behind. And they also make paint films more brittle. So paint we think of when it's dried as being hard, but it actually is a little bit plastic. It can respond to mechanical changes to dimensional changes of the canvas or to the panel support caused by temperature and relative humidity. But if the paint film becomes too brittle and it can't do that, it just cracks.
So we have zinc soap problems in Kline's paintings. And to be fair, not all zinc soaps are bad. So it's the films and the pustules that are bad. But zinc soaps that are just kind of hanging out there mixed in with the paint layer themselves can be perfectly fine. So we have a painting, Corinthian II, which has zinc soaps, but they're dispersed throughout the paint film and it's in perfect condition. But we have other paintings where we're getting these films and then that's causing issues because we're losing flakes of paint. But then there are other problems like Kline used in some cases, paints that were under bound that have too much pigment relative to media, and that produces a paint film that's very coarse and brittle. It's almost like sand. It just wants to fall apart, and that's not very good for it. So most of the time when he kind of knew what he was doing when he painted let's say straightforwardly, his paintings are thin for the most part.
What Needs to be Studied Further
Image Courtesy of Cory Rogge
If we could figure out why they were moving in certain cases and not in others, we might be able to stop it and help paintings stay in the kind of okay state of having zinc soaps. The book response, it's gone out into the world, it's still new and young, and you can read reviews of it on Amazon where some people are like, "This is the most important book about Kline ever written, and that makes us feel good." And other reviews that are like, "Well, if you want pictures, don't buy this book." Well, we have pictures. They're just small because it's a modest sized book. This isn't a catalog from a gallery show.
The Future of Franz Kline’s Works
Cory Rogge: But I think that in general, it's really informing museums and all the private owners who own Kline's work on how to think about them going forward. And hopefully it will also in the future change the art historical scholarships surrounding him. So we're pleased with it. The individuals who are specialists in the field of abstract expressionism seem to have welcomed it, so it's good. And in terms of research going forward, we looked at a very small fraction of Kline's works. There's obviously a lot more to be done. What's really fun right now is that coming out of the book, we were contacted by a gallery who had one of Kline's easels that he used in his studio, and it's got paint all over it. And so we actually purchased it for a relatively modest price and are starting to look at the paint on the easel. And then Kline's second partner's son contacted us, said, "Hey, I actually have one of Kline's palettes."
And he mixed his paints flat on a table and would use paperboard as a palette. And he asked if we would like it, and we of course said yes, and he very kindly donated it to the museum. And it's covered with colored paints. So now we have paints on the palette, paints on the easel, and paints on the painting, and we're trying to coordinate. And the palette's marvelous. It's got huge globs of paint, like he just squirted paint out of a tube, was going to use it, walked away for the night and then just never came back. It's a very human object in that way. We don't know when he purchased the easel. It occurs in photographs from the late 1950s. So we expect he was using it then. And in fact, in some photographs, you can actually see the easel in his studio and behind it, leaning against the wall is one of the paintings in our collection, which is fun.
And then the palette was probably towards the end of his life. He passed away in 1962 and had kind of had to stop painting because of health issues late in 1961, early 1962. Kline's marvelous. I joke that I've spent so many years with him that I've really grown to love him as a person, even though I've never met him. And if I could go back and have dinner with one historical figure, he'd be high on the list. He seems like he was a really good person, a person who helped others, who was good friends with the artists of his time.
One of the few people that didn't have arguments with other people. He wasn't ego driven in the way that some artists are. And he loved cats. And my favorite painting of his is a painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art from the 1940s, and it's of his cat Kitzker. And the cat itself was a tuxedo cat, but the painting got these beautiful blues and magentas and purples in it. And to me it's just the cat poised, ready to go out, out of town over the roofs of New York out hunting, and it's just paused and is staring back at Kline. It's marvelous, and I hope that someday it will go on view for people to see. But there are photos of it in the book, so you can see it there.
Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much, Cory.
Cory Rogge: It's a pleasure.
And he mixed his paints flat on a table and would use paperboard as a palette. And he asked if we would like it, and we of course said yes, and he very kindly donated it to the museum. And it's covered with colored paints. So now we have paints on the palette, paints on the easel, and paints on the painting, and we're trying to coordinate. And the palette's marvelous. It's got huge globs of paint, like he just squirted paint out of a tube, was going to use it, walked away for the night and then just never came back. It's a very human object in that way. We don't know when he purchased the easel. It occurs in photographs from the late 1950s. So we expect he was using it then. And in fact, in some photographs, you can actually see the easel in his studio and behind it, leaning against the wall is one of the paintings in our collection, which is fun.
And then the palette was probably towards the end of his life. He passed away in 1962 and had kind of had to stop painting because of health issues late in 1961, early 1962. Kline's marvelous. I joke that I've spent so many years with him that I've really grown to love him as a person, even though I've never met him. And if I could go back and have dinner with one historical figure, he'd be high on the list. He seems like he was a really good person, a person who helped others, who was good friends with the artists of his time.
One of the few people that didn't have arguments with other people. He wasn't ego driven in the way that some artists are. And he loved cats. And my favorite painting of his is a painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art from the 1940s, and it's of his cat Kitzker. And the cat itself was a tuxedo cat, but the painting got these beautiful blues and magentas and purples in it. And to me it's just the cat poised, ready to go out, out of town over the roofs of New York out hunting, and it's just paused and is staring back at Kline. It's marvelous, and I hope that someday it will go on view for people to see. But there are photos of it in the book, so you can see it there.
Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much, Cory.
Cory Rogge: It's a pleasure.
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