Fielding Dawson’s An Emotional Memoir of Franz Kline

 (Franz Kline, 1950's)

By Dylan Foley

 In the early 1950’s, Fielding Dawson was a student at the alternative Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where his painting teacher was the Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline. Kline was a former baseball player from the Pennsylvania mining country, known for his easygoing, offbeat demeanor.

Kline was friends with his fellow New York School painters Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston, who all hung out of whom at the Cedar Tavern on University Place, in Greenwich Village, and at the Artists’ Club nearby.

Dawson and Kline bonded at Black Mountain and Dawson moved to New York after he finished school. He slept on couches and became close friends with Kline. Kline mentored the younger artist and seemed to lack the incipient violence of some other hard-drinking artists like Jackson Pollock.

Dawson and Kline’s friendship blossomed after Dawson returned to the Village in 1956, after a two-year stint in the Army. Their friendship developed as the focus of the international art world shifted from Europe to America and Abstract Expressionism became dominant in criticism and sales.

The artists at the Cedar were heavy drinkers. Kline himself drank to bury the memory of his wife Betsy, a pretty ballerina who was incarcerated in a mental hospital.

By the mid-1950’s, Pollock, Kline and de Kooning had become America’s first art superstars. Kline was a famous for his large, abstract canvases with thick, black lines.

In his 1967 book, An Emotional Memoir of Franz Kline, Dawson detailed his friendship and mentor relationship with the great painter. Emotional Memoir is a small gem, covering their decade-long relationship until Kline’s death in 1962.

After 20 years of struggle through the 1930’s and 1940’s, Kline finally was realizing critical and financial success as a painter. At one point in the memoir, Dawson goes with Kline to pick up a new suit. In the hyper-masculine environment of the Cedar, Kline and Dawson managed to pull off a sensitive male relationship. 

The memoir is told as a series of vignettes in Kline and Dawson’s relationship. The women in the book are conquests and are often given nicknames, like the Witch from El Paso or the Round-Faced Girl.

By 1957, Dawson was having some success writing short stories and living in a loft in a condemned building with cracked walls. The Round-Faced Girl was actually the writer Joyce Johnson, who was working on her first novel, often using Dexedrine to write at night after her publishing job. It was a prescription shared by several writers, as she wrote in her memoir of the 1950’s Beat period called Minor Characters. 

 (Fielding Dawson, left, in the 1950's)

In his relationships with women, Dawson turned out to be a callow youth. One night, he meets Johnson at the Cedar Tavern, planning on breaking up with her, but can’t express his feelings. She wants him to take her home, saying she hates the Cedar. He counters by saying the Cedar is his home.  He has no money. She gives him a dollar to buy them beer and he pockets the change. He is then distracted by a sexy young woman, who loves his short stories.

Dawson takes Johnson home and has sex with her. After she falls asleep, he goes back to the Cedar to meet the sexy, curly-headed girl he nicknames Pretty Little.

In her own memoir, Minor Characters, Johnson’s take on Dawson is that he is an over-the-top puppy dog, pushing the limits with his copious drinking and amusing painters like Kline with his bar antics at the Cedar.

(An older Fielding Dawson)

Famed for his genial disposition, Kline could still handle himself in a street brawl. While drinking at an unfamiliar bar a dozen blocks north of the Cedar, Kline, Dawson and the poet Robert Creeley find themselves being verbally abused by several other patrons. As they walk downtown to the safety of the Cedar on University Place, a cab screeches up to them and three men jump out, attacking Kline and company. Kline took on all three men, pummeling them and beating them back. In return, he took quite a beating from his assailants, losing a tooth.

An Emotional Memoir also presents a vivid portrait of the doomed Jackson Pollock, who was killed when his car smacked into a tree in Eastern Long Island. In addition to Pollock, a woman passenger was killed and his mistress Ruth Kligman was injured.

 (Jackson Pollock in his studio, 1950's)

In 1950, Life Magazine did a profile on Pollock, where the writer asked the question, "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in America?” Jackson Pollock would storm into the Cedar, often after his Thursday night therapy sessions, looking for people to harass. Dawson recounted sitting at the bar with a fresh pack of cigarettes. Pollock sidled up to him, sat down next to him and reached over and crushed the cigarettes. He then turned his attention to a couple sitting at a nearby table, harassing the woman.

When Dawson was new to the Cedar, Kline pointed out to the door to the men’s bathroom, which had been crudely repaired. Years before, in a fit of rage, Pollock had ripped the door off it’s hinges.

In one of the most famous Kline-Pollock stories, Pollock came up to Kline at the bar and started pushing him. Kline pushed back and stated punching Pollock. Though Pollock towered over Kline at 6-foot 2-inches, the stocky, muscular Kline was stronger and got him on the ground, punching him. Pollock started laughing and said, “Not so hard, Franz.”

Periodically, Pollock would be banned from the Cedar. In one great scene in Emotional Memoir, Pollock sticks his face in the small window in the front door. His face is pleading. The bartender yells, “Jackson, you are ‘86ed,” meaning he is banned. “Jackson’s face turns menacing. Eventually, the bartender lets him in. “What can you do?” he said. It would be hard to turn away New York’s most famous painter.

Other stories about Kline flitter in. Herman Cherry, a WPA painter, who usually had trouble meeting women, picked up an art groupie at the Cedar. After sex in his loft, the next morning, the woman got up to make breakfast.  “How do you want your eggs, Franz?” The woman had thought that she had just bagged Kline.

The horrified Cherry told Kline the story a few days later at the Cedar, with a woe-is-me attitude, that the only way he could have sex was through a mistaken identity.

Kline leveled his gaze at Cherry: “You owe me a fuck,” he said.

Kline made his name through the 1940’s and 1950’s, as his style evolved from figurative paintings to epic, abstract black and white canvases, with broad, thick strokes.

Kline never got the comprehensive biography treatment that de Kooning or Pollock received. An art publisher I once interviewed told me that Kline was a nice man, but did not have enough controversy in his life to merit a biography.

In 2004, the Italian art book publisher Skira put out Franz Kline: 1910-1962, which is a gorgeous survey of his work from his days as a figurative painter and his apex when he created his great black and white canvases.

In the late 1950’s, Kline’s work day consisted of staying and drinking at the Cedar through the night, then after midnight, he’d drive back to his loft on 14^thStreet and would paint late into the early morning. One night, he took an aspiring painter from Brooklyn named Pete Hamill back to his studio. Hamill would later become a very famous New York tabloid journalist.

Kline showed Hamill a series of colorful canvases that followed the intense, broad brushstrokes of his black and white canvases. Kline worried out loud that his art dealer would not be willing to try to sell the new canvases that broke from his classics from the 1950’s like “Chief.”

An Emotional Memoir is told out of order. In the earlier part of the book, it is 1962 and Dawson has married his first wife. Dawson is in a stupor, like he has committed to his own impending death. While he and his new wife are on their honeymoon in New Mexico, visiting the poet Bob Creeley. They get word that Kline has had heart attack but survived. A month later, Kline has a second fatal heart attack.

Kline was renowned at the Cedar for his folksy, eccentric storytelling, possibly influenced by his rural roots in mining country Pennsylvania and his career as a baseball player. The poet Frank O’Hara wrote the prose poem, “Franz Kline Talking,” where the artist veers from topic to topic, non sequitor to non sequitor.

The piece originally ran in the Evergreen Review in 1958. O’Hara starts with a description of Kline’s studio “Kline’s studio is high-ceiling and light and bare, with tall north windows facing West 14^thStreet from the second floor,” wrote O’Hara. “It is a floor through, and the south windows (French) give onto a terrace, which is the store beneath (or is it a bar?). 

The interview took place at O’Hara’s apartment in Manhattan. Kline talked about his painting influences, how he was once hired by a comedian to teach painting in the Catskills.

Later, Kline mused on how civilians viewed painters an artists. “…I met this Bostonian who thought I looked pretty Bohemian,” said Kline. “His definition of a Bohemian artist was someone who could live where animals would die.”

Sources:

An Emotional Memoir of Franz Kline by Fielding Dawson (Pantheon, 1967)

“Franz Kline Talking,” by Frank O’Hara, Evergreen Review, 1958

Minor Characters: A Young Woman's Coming-Of-Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac by Joyce Johnson (1983)

Franz Kline 1910-1962, Skira, 2004