CHIEF
FRANZ KLINE, 1950
Okay. This guy. Before this painting, Franz Kline was making drawings the size of a postcard. Chief. Franz Kline. 1950. I'm not exaggerating. The guy was drawing on scraps — phone book pages, old envelopes, whatever was on his desk. Little ink sketches of chairs, street corners. Quiet stuff. Totally unremarkable. For years. Years. And then one night in 1949, he walks into Willem de Kooning's studio. De Kooning — and I love this detail — has an overhead projector in the corner. A Bell-Opticon. He says to Kline, let's throw one of your little drawings up on the wall. They pick one. Small. A few marks. They project it at ten times its size. Kline just stands there. Stares at it. And something breaks. The marks aren't a drawing anymore. They're architecture. Girders on a bridge. A little private sketch, suddenly — a room. You could walk through it. He goes home that night and starts painting at that scale. Which is, literally, what you're standing in front of. Look at the brushes he used. Housepainter brushes — five, six inches wide. Hardware-store stuff. The paint? Industrial enamel. Porch paint. The canvas is five feet by six. Get close to any stroke and you can see the speed. The drips. The wet black that stayed wet. Everyone wants to tell you this looks like Asian calligraphy. Kline hated that. Hated it. In his own words: "People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it. That's not true. I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important." So try it. Stop looking at the black. Look at the white. The wedges. The narrow lanes between strokes. Two paintings are fighting for the same canvas — and only one of them is the one you came to see. Now. The title. "Chief" — you ready for this — is the name of a black steam locomotive from Kline's childhood in a Pennsylvania coal town. His stepfather worked for the railroad. His whole early life was iron and soot and snow. Step back and look at the shapes again. Long horizontal bar. Verticals dropping off it. A wedge that could be a cowcatcher. The guy projected a sketch on a wall in 1949 and discovered he could paint big. And then, when he needed something to actually paint, he reached all the way back into his childhood and painted the train.