Fall on the Cape (Concertina Book) Painting

Spiritual yearning, melancholy, audacity, jagged, fresh visionary forces of lines and color swatches, balance, and luminosity -- all these features one can find in the paintings of Paul Kline. One might like to meditate on certain images, and one wonders from where they come. Kline is certainly a follower of Abstract Expressionism in American art, whose artists often presented extreme, violent idioms, painted with emotional brush strokes, creating a certain “order” out of chaos of the reality after the war. The language of abstract art seems to be universal and does not need a translating dictionary; it means what you feel and see in the painting for yourself. What one sees in Kline’s visions is a message that could be found in a NYC lecture by Camus (1947) “that the dignity of man, who was universally culpable for the war, could only be restored by universalism through which all men of good will may find themselves in touch with each other."* Only through person-to-person contact can we overcome national barriers. *Jeremy Lewison, "A New Spirit of Freedom:" Abstract Expressionism in Europe in the Aftermath of War