Franz Kline: Black and White, 1950-61 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, through June 4
Even the pictures that seem ready to bust out of their frames actually create a subtle interplay between painterly self-assertion and a tendency toward perfectly contained shapes. The central form of Black and White No. 1 (1952) appears to leave the frame at left and right, but the lines at the left edge are bunched together to form a single black shape, and at the right only two lines actually “exit.” The shape presented seems reasonably complete in itself.
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What gives Vawdavitch its complex and compelling beauty is the interplay between the aggressive declarativeness of its black lines and the various ways in which those lines are undercut, broken, or set amid gentler whites. Gender-oriented critics might plausibly speak of Kline’s “masculine” and “feminine” sides; I’d prefer to think of them as the two sides within each of us. The ego wants to announce its identity and visage to the world, while other, less readily named parts of the psyche see beauty in the gaps, in the empty spaces, in the self’s inadequacies and imperfections. The artist as the great form giver is there, in the masses of black, but at every moment they’re in a dialogue with the picture’s other, equally important side–just as the silhouette of a bridge traverses but will never fill the shifting light and clouds of the softer, less limited sky.
Elliott’s Stones was commissioned by the late Chicago collector Gerald Elliott, who wanted a Nauman work in stone but left the form unspecified. Nauman hired a professional gravestone cutter to create six rectangular slabs on which were inscribed the words “above yourself,” “after yourself,” “before yourself,” “behind yourself,” “beneath yourself,” and “beside yourself.” Nauman didn’t specify how the slabs were to be arranged, but for a 1990 gallery exhibit he himself arranged them in a cruciform on the floor, four stones in a vertical line with a gap in the middle, and the two others on either side of the gap. The MCA has replicated this arrangement.
