Untitled c. 1940s - 1950s

Franz Kline made this untitled artwork with ink on paper and it has a real Zen feel. I can imagine him in his studio, dipping his brush in ink, and allowing the marks to emerge spontaneously. There's this really calligraphic gesture on the left, like a dark cloud unraveling, and another one on the right, with a kind of rope attaching it to the bottom like a little acrobat. Maybe Kline was thinking about language, maybe he wasn’t. He’s leaving it up to us. The ink is thin, so it bleeds into the paper, creating these soft edges and halos. I always think of Cy Twombly's marks when I see Kline's work. They were both so good at letting go and letting the hand and arm do the work. It’s like they were having a conversation across time, each riffing off the other’s ideas, pushing the boundaries of what painting could be. Because a painting is never really finished, is it? It's just a moment in an ongoing process.