Torches Mauve
Franz Kline
1960
120 1/8" x 81 1/8"
Oil on canvas
Credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the artist, 1961

Essay by: Eileen McDonnell

Franz Kline presents Torches Mauve as a massive (120 1/8” x 81 1/8”) non-representational, vertically rectangular oil painting composed of a highly restrained palette of whites, blacks and blue violets, emphatically applied and heavily underpainted, to canvas.

Introduction to this painting begins with the striation of the surface into a vertical sandwich of twin middle toned, heftily crusted slabs of grey on either side of very dark blue black sheaths of sliced synthetic meat. Compressed by an imaginary grasp at the horizontal center, this densely applied velvety black veined filler expands at top and bottom. The directional up and down generously painted black swathes are veritably squeezed and spill over the edges of the canvas, unfettered and brazenly trespassing the parameters of the horizontal stretchers. This dark, compositionally vertical format sits upright in bed as if the sudden blast of a morning alarm has sprayed the now erect tightened cords of black steel with icy grey blue blasts of shattering cold water from both sides. Prone, tense and taut, the most prominent component of this painting becomes this thick dark maw of burnt blue black fudge that scrapes from a source above the towering canvas with an earthbound swiping slash, ripping through a grey blue muddy field to its crashing end, somewhere below the gargantuan canvas. By virtue of the enormous scale of this work, brushstrokes are infused with thumping, thunderous rumbles which might, on a smaller scale, project a less sonorous power. It is this expressive gesture, however, this visceral charge of the visible hog’s hair bristles that scratch through the wettest skin of paint to the underlying layers of black and white pigment which electrifies this work. Tentative, Franz Kline is not.

Surrounding these central scythe-raked splintered beams of black rusted steel lie two comparatively quieter fields of lighter middle-tone hue, equal in cool grey value. These fields are pushed back into the canvas, behind the monolithic central inky black repoussoir component because the painterly, corpulent strokes defining this swarthy colossal character are more clearly defined by cragged sharp brushstrokes and they therefore three-dimensionally overlap those more thinly painted grey and soft lavender arenas. The right vertical band is predominantly a dusky Mars violet, generously spiked with shards of steel black shavings, left as drips, or found scraped from an underpainting. These plumes of blown purplish dust puff from open pores, their source an energy generated from below the painting’s edge – volcanic in intensity yet white hot in tonal bluish color. From this offstage bubbling caldron of impasto sauce one can imagine the turbid, slowly pushed pops of air that could release such undulating smoke signals; thickly applied from the lowest right corner of the painting, the heated breaths become rhythmic in their separating hues of violet – then whitish lavender – then ashen grey, as they alight out through the open valve of the upper right: BOOM! PUFF – puff – puffff. However, a blacker, modulated hairline suggestion of encapsulation exists in this upper right sphere which intensifies the concentrated – and controlled – direction of the molten bluish steam. Compressing the charging lavender ash’s release, as if through a roaring chimney threshold, and capturing its power within the vertical [at least] confines of the canvas composition, this thin, dry brush black’s very existence suggests a corroded pipe’s cross-section, exposing the dynamic innards of some industrial machine. Without this threadbare mark, the smudgy, background purplish surging steam would aimlessly dissipate from the canvas, its vulcanian energy released unharnessed.

The murky violet mist, condensed in the netherworld above the canvas, circles counterclockwise and begins an imaginary descent back into Torches Mauve from the upper left corner of the painting. Departing as a vapor, the hazy atmospheric grey and lavender reappears now in liquid form. In blinding sheets of torrential rain, flattened planes of molten blue-white hue drool down the canvas, scraped through to the raw ground and are then lightly repainted, in lapping, gushing waves of intensity: the inner current appearing to be thicker and slower, the leftmost one thinner, hotter, traversing faster and further downward. This reentry pulsates back into the canvas as ferociously as it burned and billowed out (from the right) but instead of the smushed softer lavender clouds that once existed, this channel’s fury becomes almost crystalline, as snowy white edges are more clearly delineated, their outlines defined by concisely contrasted dark steely greys beneath the flattened milky planes. The mysterious amorphous floating ghosts of the right seem to be identifying themselves, now, on the left...
From behind the blue white sheets of liquid heat then, this left side of the canvas exposes enormous scrapes and blackish grey brushstrokes of a cooler underpainting that must sit behind this glassy sheet of cascading, mostly white condensation. Although there still exist suggestive burps of lavender painted smudged smoke, a vertical plane of scraped black rain progressively emerges more clearly as it continues down the canvas. These cooler, more solidified needlelike strokes and scrapes of sharp edged black and white spikes sputter and spit down into this left side alley of the canvas, and, as if arrows sprung from the bows of a medieval army, in unison they hail and clatter in a gusty downward melee. This surge of splintered precipitation evokes a nighttime cloudburst that is captured, glimpsed then smeared between the desperate smashing of futile windshield wiper blades. Within these stolen nanoseconds a deep volume is perceptible: the crackling downpour of painted crisp black and white spindles begin to cluster into rhythmic upright layers of wire mesh sheets, their woven vertical thrust receding into an incrementally obscured blurred horizon. This wet landscape seems to regress most effectively, however, by the presence of a large, densely black triangular shape in the lower left of the canvas. The sooty black pigment that defines this shape is so opaque that it seems ground into the canvas, its mass heavily clotting the surface.

As if peeking just over the shoulder of a shadowy, shrouded figure, the membranes of the paler grey mesh screens behind this pitchy mass are now indeed forcibly thrust into the background. The ebony of this foreground hue is a pure black, unmodulated by the dilution of any grey, white or lavender infusion and it is this deep tonal clarity that imbues its dark presence with the most trenchant repoussoir within Torches Mauve’s composition. The background’s up and down, torrid motif is echoed in this flinty black shape with briskly pulled brushstrokes of charred currents, volumetric in undulating bas-relief sheaths of matte-then-glossy jet pigment. This foreground corner takes its next obliquely directional cue less forcefully from the aforementioned gesture, however, than from the inclusion of two very small white right triangles that are positioned in the lowest left corner of the painting. These serrated incisions galvanize the dense corner with a pulsating vigor here as did the similarly effective black stroke of the upper right: they provide a pipelike channel and delineate, by their minute existence, the path of the gestural energy invoked. Instead of becoming a staid, weighty mass of dense black, then, this corner is evidently another massive swipe of now-ashy blazing torque, its leftside directional border thus explained by the glimmering exposed white triangles. The turbine machination motif thus reinstated, the thumping rousing thrust of Torches Mauve vibrates, most forcefully here, the very floor of this pigmented engine.

Into the left center foreground of the canvas this closest, broiling black steampipe breathes the hottest breaths, and its dense glutinously painted current sears from across the lowest left edge of the canvas into some implied continuation; were we able to follow this wide muscular swipe of black paint through to its completion, the brushstroke would gradate into its eventual termination, trailing as a lift from the canvas after another two feet or so. Instead, we are arrested by the handicap of the canvas’ bottommost horizontal flange and almost bumped back into the composition by the imaginary resultant steam generated from below the scorching, churning crisscrossing pipes of charcoal pigment and infernal rivers previously encountered. A less viscously painted, more gently applied vertical plane of bluish dove-grey appears behind this immense thunderously sluiced diagonal scrape of dark, dry pigment and presents a somewhat restful plane of now-thinner overlapping brushstrokes.

From the enframing composition of heated spitting paint around which we’ve journeyed the counterclockwise edges of Torches Mauve, we now bravely slice through that cindery disposition into much cooler, languorous place, from the bottom middle of the painting. Metamorphosing like a reversible coat, the inverted “U” horseshoe outer edges of the painting that had (‘til now) housed images of drybrushed currents of braised heat are literally transformed and those edges now become the dank, cool walls of an unexpected cave; an enflamed humor is transposed, suddenly, as if we’d entered an air-conditioned room from a sweltering beach.

Through this lowest central softly painted plane, we now emerge into a relatively calm – though swiftly painted – purplish blue-lit alcove, its floor a murky, grey black deep pool, and echoes of seeping drips from its high cool ceiling are almost palpable. Here, dead-center, at the very edge of this blackish violet subcellar lies a bluish white, double-dabbed painted notation of a fully loaded cat’s tongue brush. A veritable stepping stone, this chalky demarcation entreats us to a welcome moment of relaxation. From this cropped pale, inert platform we can see, on the buff grey quartz walls that surround the dull bluish purple central path of mottled quiet water, a twinkling dance of northern lights as the water’s reflections undulate over the wet, saturated lime-leached surfaces in glowing, blinking translucent cobwebs of cool grey and tinctures of opalescent red and blue violet.

This solitary thick gob of precipitously positioned paint beckons us to enter the cavernous recess and the entreating alabaster coaster carries the embarked viewer now deep into the girth of the dark grey, boldly stroked tunnel, into the tonally weighted ballast – the very belly – of the painting. Enveloping this centralmost blackish channel of damask-striped slaglike pigment are paler monolithic walls of splotched grey-violet which, supportively positioned and impeccably counterbalancing each side of the dense, decidedly misaligned rectilinear chasm, summon the image of hulking chiseled guardians framing the entrance to an increasingly chilly, rocky hollow. Presented initially aboveground as the canvas’ rightside vent of smudged billowing hot steam, these poking lavender up and down streaks are now transformed, in this damp earthen grotto, as shadowy granite walls, their reflections mirrored as subtly painted grey strokes on the lower right of the torpid river. Similarly morphed, the cascading rivets of blackened painted arrows that initially sputtered into the canvas from the condensing sky (from the left) masquerade now within this imaginary subterranean vignette as very solid leftside walls, smoked with thinly painted diaphanous wisps of warmish waxy ecru.

Beneath the gentle roil of progressively tamer brushstrokes, the deep purple undercurrent coaxes us along as if floating inward , deeper into the canvas. It is at this watery middleground where we waft to an awry right-angled, clearly defined dark grey gash; having imaginarily cocked languidly to the right, the canvas now captures the see-sawing subsequent bobbing dip at its diagonal direction to the left. Suspended at this cool grey, compositionally sub-central and mostly horizontal fracture, the disquieting tenor of this off-kilter, slanting horizon line intonates, via its unnatural angle, a lurking danger beneath the glassy, smoothly painted pulled surface.

Across the aqueous expanse of this dark, evenly applied painted tributary, an implicit silence is punctuated by the vast smudged perpendicular slashes of horizontal blue violet, suggestive of still water, on the lower right third of the painting. Superimposing the central dark matte, perspectively diminishing “V” vertical retreat, therefore, these broad deliberately applied–stopped–and lifted, attenuating lavender strokes function as the most definitive of this painting’s transferred values. Following the dark, icy cold now semiglossed blue violet vertical passage into the center, the askew, very dark tar-black horizontal outline on the middle lower left diminishes in feathering dry brushed modulation, until, with one very cold, vertically slicing stroke of shaved, slushy blue-white paint, that edge disappears. From the lower left, this arching gesture creates the unsettling albeit tantalizing illusion of an infinity-edged swimming pool.

Sliding across this now-realized innocuous horizontal crest of predominantly cool, blue-grape black, a tranquil bump in the lagoon at the canvas’ midsection directs us into a magnificent, gothicly vertical cavernous hall. The cave’s interior spatial depth beyond this fathomless, chilly and very dark purplish black dappled channel is perspectively defined by a glowing iris-hued trapezoidal portal that is posited to the left of the geographical center of the canvas. This distant marginated gateway, its brilliant whitish lavender the ultimate focal point against the contrasting blackish blue wall, becomes further defined as a far flung space via the carefully applied deep slate grey, left underpainted, in a geometric flagstone-shaped enticing path just below. The lit, matte-white, frescolike farthest suggestive vertical plane beyond this crooked pointed doorway glows with a seductive luminosity as if lighted from a towering skylight exposed far above the dark gloomy cave. A thin, horizontally triangular slice of pale lavender above this exit mimics the distant light’s placement like a window and also suggests (in contrast to the shiny-then-dull black throbs of violently scraped, vertical veins of paint) a rough-hewn, eroded, peeping crevice of nature’s unpredictable design. A drilled strategic skewer of vertically receding cool lavender white light, this gulleted, softly painted flue demarks the End of the Ride beyond the giant purple black, vertically endless ambiguous shaft that enframes it. To exit back into that heated belching white hot maelstrom of stinging pointed black and hot white darts above this we must scale the clammy columned chamber of thinly painted plum white plaster, up through the rasped, mined throat behind the immense cooled igneous black bands to an imaginary surface of indefinite height.

In Torches Mauve, Franz Kline has created a work of gestural grandiosity. The magnitude of his brave, bold, heavily loaded strokes of pigment are strongly counter-balanced by the broad planes of negative space (painted in a variegated vocabulary of scrapes here, thin pigment there). The palpable velocity of these virulently expressive visual statements helm this work’s initial seduction. It is the architectonic volume, plinthlike and confident placement of each stroke (and non-stroke), however, that compositionally support the work, like stalwart girders of a suspension bridge gouged and bored deep into the bedrock below a river’s silt. The limited, highly contrasting palette works to this painting’s advantage in that it clearly echoes, with pinpoint accuracy, the directions to which Kline guides us. These truly massive themes thus nailed, the playful edge-spilling scrawls, jarring helter-skelter sketchy skewers and velvety soft, spatial spreads of [apparent] nothingness become delightfully coincidental and liminally decorative bonuses.