Piecework

At some point we started talking about cartoonists. His face brightened as he sipped his beer. “I wanted to be a cartoonist when I started out. I wanted that more than anything.” He loved the cartoons of Willard Mullin in the World-Telegram. (“I don’t know how he does it, day after day, on that level. The guy’s a genius.”) He was the first man to tell me he was a fan of the amazing Cliff Sterrett, whose surrealistic comic strip, “Polly and her Pals,” was usually overlooked by the solemn analysts of popular culture. And of course he paid homage to George Herriman, whose “Krazy Kat” was the highbrows’ favorite comic strip. “But you know,” he said, “I even like ‘Orphan Annie.’ The politics are neanderthal. But the man knows how to use blacks.”

I was astonished. This was years before pop art was proclaimed by critics as the successor to abstract expressionism. No painter’s vision seemed more distant from cartooning than the great bold abstractions of Franz Kline. But as he talked that night, I realized that it was comics that had made him want to be an artist. Born in 1910, he grew up in the ’20s with John Held Jr. as his hero. Held’s drawings in the old Life and Judge and Vanity Fair made him the most famous cartoonist of his time. In their way, Held’s short-skirted flappers and bell-bottomed college boys expressed the hedonism and silliness of the Roaring Twenties as powerfully as the stories of Scott Fitzgerald. But Kline saw form as well as content; he liked the way Held designed a page, placing a number of figures in the space but using blacks to establish a pattern that became the true structure of the drawing.

Kline also talked with affection of certain illustrators and figurative painters. He admired Jack Levine and praised John Sloan and Reginald Marsh, who in different ways had embraced the energy and tension of the city the way the New York School did with pure paint. (Kline once said to Irving Sandier, “Hell, half the world wants to be like Thoreau at Walden, worrying about the noise of traffic on the way to Boston; the other half use up their lives being part of that noise. I like the second half.”) As we talked, he was amused, perhaps even delighted, that I knew the work of the British pen-and-ink illustrators — men like John Leech, Donald Keene, and above all Phil May, who tried to turn the city into art.

“Phil May got me to go to England,” Kline said. “I wanted to draw like he did, that big open confident way.” Franz Kline in England? Yes: before the war. After two years at Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Art, he moved to London in 1935 and enrolled in art school. He was apparently not much touched by the political fevers of the day: the Spanish Civil War, the threat of fascism, the romance of communism. Instead, he absorbed the look of architecture, trains, bridges, ships, theaters, music halls. He spent hundreds of hours drawing the figure and mastering the principles of composition. He walked the streets that once teemed with Phil May’s ragamuffins. He looked hard at the drawings of the Frenchmen: Daumier, Steinlen, and Forain. In London, the dream of a career as a cartoonist gave way to the desire to be an illustrator.

London also had a certain logic for the young man who became Franz Kline. With the grand exception of Turner, it had produced great draftsmen rather than colorists (Hogarth, Rowlandson, Tenniel, du Maurier, Gillray, Phiz). For Franz, London must have been a gloriously dark indoor city of black and white. I often wonder what his art would have been like if he’d gone instead to Venice or Mexico.

“I had a good time there,” he said of London. “I was never so hungry in my life. But I really did learn to draw.”

When I mentioned that I’d spent a year in art school in Mexico, his eyes brightened and he laughed. “When I came back from London, everybody around was trying to be Orozco or Siqueiros, except the guys who wanted to be Mondrian.” He and his wife (whom he’d met in England) moved to Manhattan in 1938, with Franz now determined to be a fine artist. He missed being part of the great brawling fraternity of New York artists who worked for the WPA, but he slowly got to know most of them in the bohemian bars of Greenwich Village. “Some of them liked the Mexicans because of the politics,” Kline said. “Some, like Jackson, for the size of the work.” He shrugged. “I didn’t care for all of them, but I liked the attempt, you know? They could all draw. They had power. They were trying to do something big.”