![]() ![]() Elizabeth recalls the painter’s association between his abstract line and other, more figural expressions of artistic movement-titles of other paintings with such structural compositions pay homage to artists that Kline admired, such as dancers Nijinsky and Merce Cunningham, and jazz clarinetist Barney Bigard. As such, the painting is exemplary of the rich connotations inherent in the artist’s most renowned works, all rooted in the plasticity of the paint and the purity of his unadulterated coloristic counterpoints in conjunction with absolute subjectivity and personal experience. A stunning portrait of intimacy, Elizabeth is named for Kline’s wife, the ballet dancer Elizabeth Parsons, who, like the famous Russian dancer Nijinsky, suffered from schizophrenia. Elizabeth, painted in 1961, is brilliantly demonstrative of the artist’s sophisticated brand of Action Painting, evoking the compositional equilibrium that has become such an indelibly significant aspect of his artistic legacy through the vigorous swathes of rich black and crisp white that delineate its surface. It was with unparalleled gestural velocity and structural elegance that Kline executed a singular oeuvre of supremely powerful canvases rendered in the stark yet eloquent polarity of his favored bichromatic palette. As the semi-representational imagery of his earlier career was relinquished and Franz Kline liberated line from likeness, the forthright black geometry of his visual lexicon gained a strength and presence as individual and impactful as Pollock’s drip, Newman’s zip, and Rothko’s stacks of ethereal hues.
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