By Marion Maneker
You might want to go straight from White Cube across the street to Mnuchin Gallery, where they’ve gathered an impressive selection of works by echt abstract expressionist Franz Kline, borrowing important examples from the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and Glenstone. I say that because the gallery explicitly says the show is meant to offer a reappraisal of the artist, “situating his innovations within their midcentury context while engaging with the evolving discourse of contemporary abstraction.”
As a pocket retrospective of Kline’s apex period from 1950 to 1960—he died young, at 51 years old—the show will make you go “Oof!” if you’re into this gut-punch style of painting. These gestural works look as if they were painted in one burst of emotion, but the show cleverly gathers studies for works like Harleman, from 1960, and Chief, from 1950, and hangs them within eyesight of the larger paintings. The finished works have a remarkable fidelity to the studies, and you can see that what appears to be an offhand, unconscious gesture is actually calculated and painstakingly executed.