CHIEF
FRANZ KLINE, 1950
For years, Franz Kline was making these tiny little drawings. Phone book pages. Old envelopes. Scraps of paper. Chairs, streets, bridges. Stuff you could fold up and lose in your pocket. Then one night in 1948, he's hanging out in Willem de Kooning's studio. De Kooning has this projector in the corner. A Bell-Opticon. He grabs one of Kline's drawings. A black rocking chair, four inches by five. Let's see what happens. They turn off the lights and throw it up on the wall. And the thing goes huge. The legs of the chair stop looking like chair legs. Now they're girders. The little white gaps turn into windows. Suddenly it's a building you could walk into. Kline just stands there. Then he goes home and starts painting big. Five feet by six. Brushes as wide as your hand. Black paint flying across the canvas. At least, that's what it looks like. Like he walked up, took a few enormous swings, and went out for lunch. He didn't. Kline usually started with small drawings, then slowly rebuilt them on the canvas. Black, then white, then more black, then more white. The white isn't whatever he left blank. He painted that too. Kline said, "I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important." Those narrow white lanes squeezing through the black. It's not black paint sitting on a white background. It's two paintings shoving each other around. Then there's the title. Chief. That was the name of a locomotive Kline remembered from growing up in Pennsylvania. His father killed himself when Kline was seven. A couple of years later he was sent away, to a school for fatherless boys. He came home at fifteen. By then his mother had married a foreman on the Lehigh Valley Railroad. So the tracks, the bridges, the trains, all that big black machinery, it was everywhere. It's what a train leaves behind after it tears past you.