![]() It is testament to Sawyer’s significance within Kline’s oeuvre that it was celebrated in the artist’s first posthumous institutional retrospective exhibition in the United States at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1968-1969. The works exhibited here stand as remarkable examples of the bravura of Kline's late oeuvre, which tragically ended with his premature death just two years later in 1962. In 1960, the same year Kline represented the United States at the 30th Venice Biennale, Sawyer was debuted in Kline’s solo exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, alongside some of the artist’s now most esteemed masterpieces, including Black, White and Gray, 1959, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dahlia, 1959, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Orange and Black Wall, 1959, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Orleans, 1959, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This gives rise to a sensation of infinite, limitless space, while simultaneously pushing the immense black form forward towards the viewer. Subtle but dominated by black and white, the work is enlivened by gesturally painted impastoed passages of cream, ochre, peach, chalky whites and greys that infuse the composition with a soft, atmospheric tone. Painted in 1959 at the peak of Kline’s career, the painting exemplifies the artist’s seminal move toward color just three years prior. Kline's signature black gestures, etched as deeply into the landscape of post-war art as Jackson Pollock's “drips” or Barnett Newman’s “zips”, are here thrust across the vast canvas to form a grid-like structure. Like an immense architectural structure seen up close, Sawyer towers over the viewer with its all-absorbing, heroic scale. ![]() Embodying the extraordinary compositional balance of energy and restraint that catapulted Franz Kline to critical acclaim, Sawyer is the paradigm of the Abstract Expressionist artist's pictorial idiom.
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