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This 1938 woodcut by Franz Kline depicts a winter scene in New York City, complete with an evergreen tree getting transported in a horse-drawn vehicle.
CLARK VAN ORDEN/THE TIMES LEADER
After his father’s death in 1917, Wilkes-Barre native Franz Kline spent six years at Girard College, a Philadelphia boarding school “for fatherless boys.” Assigned to train for foundry work there, he was not the best of students.
But by the time he was ready for high school, his mother had remarried and was able to bring her son home to Carbon County.
As a student at Lehighton High School, at last the young man found his niche.
“He earned an ‘A’ in art,” said Dick Smith of Wilkes-Barre, a board member of the Luzerne County Historical Society who is putting together a small exhibit of Kline’s work – from the abstract expressionism for which Kline became internationally famous to an earlier, realistic woodcut.
There is even some work he created as a teen.
“This is what he did for the yearbook,” Smith said, showing samples of the cartoon-like drawings Kline had sketched to represent student athletes, a student thespian and the like.
You’ll be able to see many images of the artist’s work when the Historical Society hosts “Franz Kline: Coal and Steel,” a lecture set for March 23 at the Westmoreland Club in downtown Wilkes-Barre.
The event will include a dinner, a display of Kline memorabilia Smith is putting together and a talk by Robert S. Mattison, professor of art history at Lafayette College in Easton and curator-at-large for the Allentown Art Museum.
Mattison, who plans to bring 50 to 100 images of Kline’s work to the lecture, said the artist’s paintings are dynamic and forceful, expressing the power and the destructiveness of modern industry.
“I think he saw both sides of the coin,” Mattison said. “It’s all connected to those feelings of being brought up in anthracite country.”
“He would have seen the coal breakers, the trestles and trains and slag heaps when he was growing up,” Mattison said.
“Palmerton, Pa.” is one of his famous paintings, and it’s a kind of tanny/yellow painting. People associate it with the ‘golden light’ of America, but it has more to do with the zinc that destroyed the vegetation,” the professor continued, explaining Kline actually mixed the element zinc into his paints.
Some of his best known work is black-and-white abstract expressionism. In those paintings, Mattison said, “Kline found a language to reveal those feelings he had about modernity as a whole. It was forceful and tragic at the same time.”
The artist, who spent his earliest years in Wilkes-Barre, is still influencing creative work today. Dallas artist Sue Hand said his bold “slashing, abstract expressionist style” inspired her hexagonal tribute to anthracite miners, which was exhibited locally as “Hollowed Ground.”
“I’ve gone to his grave (in Wilkes-Barre’s Hollenback Cemetery),” Hand said. “Just thinking, trying to get into his head.
“He painted what he knew and became well known for it.”
Indeed he did, said Mattison, who lives in the Easton area. “I’ve gone to his stomping grounds up north and thought, ‘My God, this is Franz Kline’s landscape. I can see it all around me. It’s Jim Thorpe. It’s Lehighton. It’s Hazleton. It’s Palmerton. All these coal areas.”
IF YOU GO
What: ‘Franz Kline: Coal and Steel,’ the art and life of the Wilkes-Barre native
Speaker: Robert S. Mattison, art professor and museum curator, to lecture from 7:45 to 9 p.m.
Sponsored by: Luzerne County Historical Society
Where: Westmoreland Club, 59 S. Franklin St., Wilkes-Barre
When: March 23. Reception begins at 6 p.m., dinner at 7.
Tickets, which include dinner: $75, $65 members, $50 students
Reservations: 823-6244, ext. 3, by Wednesday