In general, a breakthrough is both purely intellectual, or artistic, and necessarily social, requiring that it be recognised as such by a significant number of others. In 1959 the critic Irving Sandler could generalise that ‘The experience of breakthrough was a common one in the late Forties among a group of New York painters, who despite their objections to any labels, are called Abstract Expressionists or Action Painters.’ 5 Given the frequency of breakthroughs among artists in the US during the late 1940s, they appeared to amount to more than disparate discoveries and increasingly gave the impression of a collective American artistic movement. In the specific context of abstract expressionism, a breakthrough entailed a move away from figuration towards abstraction and, most particularly, from the European tradition of painting towards a unique personal style. Nowhere was this phrasing debated and decided upon explicitly, but it solidified into a compound noun and ‘breakthrough’ became the premise for the greatness of the New York School.įundamentally, the trope was a rhetorical dramatisation of one of modernism’s main imperatives: the rejection of tradition. While also violent, the phrase ‘break through’, by contrast, emphasised intellectual discovery and described a hard-fought and well-deserved triumph over a formidable obstacle, rather than against an opponent or competitor. ‘Take over’ involved appropriation from another group and smacked of theft, as was suggested in the title, decades later, of art historian Serge Guilbaut’s landmark study of abstract expressionism, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Over the course of the 1950s, more than ‘take over’, the phrasal verb ‘break through’ caught on in American art criticism in order to explain how the New York School displaced and replaced the School of Paris. Hess had championed the American abstract expressionists as the heirs to European abstraction, which, as Hess argued in his 1951 book on the movement titled Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase, had formerly been centred in Paris and had recently relocated to New York: ‘New York becomes Paris for the art of its time, and also takes over Paris’ tradition.’ 3 Of these stakes Hess was acutely aware as a critic and the editor of Art News. Much was at stake in Hess’s use of the words ‘broke through’, which had already become a trope of abstract expressionist discourse by 1962. It is in this context and with these stakes in mind that Meryon can be situated as Kline’s revisiting of his breakthrough, which occurred alongside other contemporary attempts to come to terms with the significance of Kline’s achievement and with the particular trajectory of his development. Since this period, Kline’s artistic accomplishment has been defined through this dramatic narrative account of his breakthrough, which is why it is so important to any study of Kline’s work. Thus, while Kline’s ‘breakthrough’ refers to an event from the late 1940s, the specific description that we have inherited was created and achieved currency in the early 1960s. It thus emerged long after the artistic ‘breakthrough’ itself took place, which may have been in 1948, 1949 or 1950, and appeared very soon after Kline’s death. It is crucial to note that the now-standard account of Kline’s breakthrough appeared in its final and current form in 1962. As the analysis of contemporary criticism given elsewhere in this In Focus demonstrates, critics who saw the exhibition in which Meryon was first shown – held in late 1961 at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York – were expecting at that point a ‘change’ in artistic orientation and considered Kline’s return to his black and white palette to be the product of a failure to develop his artwork. Additionally, Kline’s combined breakthrough style and palette only became identifiable as uniquely important and uniquely his own after he reaffirmed it a decade later in his reversion to black and white in works like Meryon, and after his death in 1962 precluded the possibility of another, equivalent breakthrough. Kline’s artistic discovery, and its public debut in his one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery, New York, in late 1950, thus took place after the breakthroughs of others and came in their wake and model. It was also paradoxical, in the sense that the discovery of his distinctive variety of gestural abstraction, in combination with his particular palette of black and white, post-dated the breakthroughs of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, as well as those of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Meryon 1960–1 (Tate T00926) brings the central problem in the interpretation of Franz Kline’s work into focus: in several senses, Kline’s ‘breakthrough’ – a term that will be problematised below – occurred belatedly.
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