Untitled [verso] c. 1940s - 1950s

Franz Kline made this untitled work with ink on paper, and the loose, open quality of his marks gives it the feeling of a sketch, or maybe just some studio noodling. It's a busy page, isn't it? Look at how he's framed some of the ink drawings with rectangles, and then let others float free around the page. See that patch of blue at the top? Was it a mistake, a doodle, or something else? I love the ambiguity of that. The different weights of the lines – some thin and scratchy, others bold and confident – really speak to the artist’s process. It’s like he's thinking out loud with his brush. Kline is known for his large-scale black and white abstractions, but here you see some early figurative sketches. Later he would reference the figure, perhaps influenced by Philip Guston, though he also reminds me of Cy Twombly’s raw, energetic line. Art’s like one long conversation, isn’t it?