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Franz Kline (American, 1910-1962)
Zinc Yellow, 1959
Oil on canvas, 93 x 79 1/2 inches
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
© The Franz Kline Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

With the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s, New York at last supplanted Paris as the leading art center of the Western world. The new movement was spearheaded by an array of extraordinarily talented painters--Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline--and it remained America's predominant avant-garde aesthetic until the end of the 1950s.

Though the members of the group, which was also called the New York School, practiced a variety of personal styles and techniques, they were generally united in their adherence to abstraction and to working on a monumental scale. Many, like Kline, were also committed to the exuberant, gestural act of painting, which freed their work of all rational constraints and made it, instead, the vehicle for their own spontaneous, subconscious impulses. "The need," said Motherwell, "[was] for felt experience-intense, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic." Profoundly disillusioned by the political failures of the Depression and World War II, the Abstract Expressionists rejected the intellectual and technological mainsprings of earlier twentieth-century culture, which they viewed as bankrupt. In so doing, they overturned long-held notions about the basic moral and aesthetic functions of art, and with their abstractions they created an entirely new visual language.

Kline began his career in a traditional figurative vein. But by the time of his first one-man exhibit in 1950 at the Egan Gallery in New York, he had fully embraced abstraction and begun to perfect the primal black-and-white linear structures that rapidly became his signature imagery. He emerged as the consummate Action Painter; as Sam Hunter has written, "The negligent edges of shape [in his work], the changes, revisions, and overpainting give the impression that [he was] directly engaged by the creative process."

After half a decade of notoriety as "the black and white artist," Kline reintroduced color into his art in 1955-56. Painted in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1959, the Chrysler's Zinc Yellow is an important late work in which Kline enriched his traditional black-white imagery with color. A roughly slashed field of yellow on the right of the canvas (Kline sometimes worked with wide housepainter brushes) collides with an advancing wedge of black. This painterly action is set against an atmospheric veil of white through which play subtle blue and gray tones. As in much of Kline's finest work, the effect is intensely exciting, yet somehow lyrical and contemplative.
Kline's small oil study for Zinc Yellow is also in the Museum's collection.

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