![]() Sylvester: So you might be aware quite early on? Sylvester: And at what point in doing them are you aware that they might look like a bridge? No, if someone says, ‘that looks like a bridge’, it doesn’t bother me really. Kline: No, I don’t mind whether they are or whether they’re not. ‘Are they to be read as referring to something outside themselves? Do you mind whether they are? Do you mind whether they’re not?’ Their subsequent discussion on this crucial point deserves to be quoted at length: ‘How do you want your pictures to be read?’, the British art critic David Sylvester asked Kline in 1960. Most of Kline’s titles fall into a few similar categories of reference, as will be shown below, and the fact that Kline asked for his friends’ help in selecting titles does not mean that his own input was any less. 2Īs Elaine de Kooning recalled in an interview: ‘We kept on picking names of places that meant something to him.’ 3 That Kline initially held naming sessions for his paintings with friends, including notably for eight hours with the artists Willem and Elaine de Kooning and art dealer Charles Egan for his first exhibition of 1950, testifies to the fact that Kline took his titles very seriously from the earliest phases of his abstraction. As the artist explained in 1960: ‘I don’t have the feeling that something has to be completely non-associative as far as figure form is concerned.’ 1 ![]() The title’s ambiguity might appear to serve the cause of Kline’s abstraction, but Kline himself did not view his abstraction in such absolute terms. Only those familiar with the modern master of printmaking and with the Pennsylvania town would have understood these titular references, yet to view the painting without them in mind would be to deny Kline’s Meryon its full meaning. It arguably refers both to the nineteenth-century French printmaker Charles Meryon, who was renowned for his moody etchings of medieval Paris, and to the upper-crust town of Merion on the Pennsylvania Main Line, which was only two hours’ drive and yet worlds away from Kline’s humble birthplace of Wilkes-Barre in the Coal Region of north-eastern Pennsylvania. ![]() This In Focus project was made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.The title of Franz Kline’s painting Meryon 1960–1 (Tate T00926 fig.1) is a homophonic pun. Published in October 2017, the project is authored by AnnMarie Perl (Princeton University) and includes a contribution from Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer (Emory University). Finally, it explores the impact of illustration and printmaking on Kline’s work and looks at his relationship with contemporary Japanese calligraphers, notably the Kyoto-based avant-garde calligraphy group Bokujinka. It also analyses Kline’s choice of title, a pun on the name of a nineteenth-century French printmaker Charles Meryon and the well-heeled commuter town Merion in his home state of Pennsylvania. It explores why Kline returned to his earlier style by considering the significance of the retrospective exhibitions and critical writing his work was the subject of at the time. ![]() This In Focus offers the first in-depth study of Meryon, an under-researched but major work in Kline’s career. It is an example of the bold gestural style and black and white palette that Kline first became known for a decade earlier, and to which he returned in the years before his death in 1962. Meryon is a large abstract painting made in New York in 1960–1 by the American abstract expressionist painter Franz Kline.
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