Hot Jazz (Bleecker Street Tavern Mural)

This is an oil on canvas painting. It is a scene set in a bar or tavern with a female singer dressed in a blue dress in the center. The musicians, in tuxedos, frame the singer: the saxophonist to her left, pianist and trumpet player behind her, and the drummer to her right, in the background. She is further set into the picture plane by the red arches of the interior room.		Franz Kline
American (1910-1962)
Hot Jazz (Bleecker Street Tavern Mural), 1940
Oil on canvas
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
Modern Art
Location:  Exhibit, Gallery 202
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Dimensions:  H: 45 1/2 in, W: 46 1/2 in, FH: 53 1/4 in, FW: 54 in
Object ID: 71.1077

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This is an oil on canvas painting. It is a scene set in a bar or tavern with a female singer dressed in a blue dress in the center. The musicians, in tuxedos, frame the singer: the saxophonist to her left, pianist and trumpet player behind her, and the drummer to her right, in the background. She is further set into the picture plane by the red arches of the interior room.
Franz Kline
Wilkes-Barre, Pa. 1910-1962 New York, N.Y.
Hot Jazz (Bleecker Street Tavern Mural), 1940
Oil on canvas, 45 1/2 × 46 1/2 in. (115.6 × 118.1 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: KLINE 40
Inscribed and monogrammed on the reverse: BAR ROOM PAINTING
\tab\tab\tab\tab 1940
\tab\tab\tab\tab FK (in ligature)
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 71.1077
Reproduction © 2004 The Franz Kline Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

References: Harry F. Gaugh, The Vital Gesture: Franz Kline, New York, 1985, pp. 34-39; David Anfam, "Franz (Rowe) Kline," Grove Dictionary of Art, New York, 1996, XVIII, p. 132.

The vigorously painted black-and-white abstractions that Franz Kline began producing in New York around 1950 brought him worldwide acclaim and secured his position as a leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement (see object 71.666). Yet he began his New York career not with abstractions, but with more traditional figurative works like Hot Jazz of 1940. In these early pieces Kline was influenced by the German Expressionists and the American Scene painters John Sloan and Reginald Marsh (see objects 71.702, 71.2240, 71.734).
After working unsuccessfully as a designer of window displays for a Buffalo, New York, department store, Kline went to New York City in 1938 and settled in Greenwich Village. As an unknown and struggling young artist, he initially took on whatever artistic work was offered him. He frequently made portrait sketches of the more colorful residents of Greenwich Village, and he painted murals for neighborhood bars and taverns.
In 1940 the owner of the Bleecker Street Tavern in Greenwich Village hired Kline to paint a series of murals-some eight or nine oils on canvas-for which he was paid five dollars apiece plus the cost of materials. As Harry Gaugh has noted, this set of wall panels was Kline's earliest sizable public commission and his most ambitious project to date. Among the most appealing of these lively Bleecker Street pictures of dancers, singers, and circus performers is Hot Jazz, which was removed from the tavern by 1961, by which time the building had been demolished. (Interestingly, Kline had produced a set of rudimentary Jazz murals seven years earlier for a roller-skating rink in Lehighton, Pennsylvania.) The other surviving works from the Bleecker Street series are today mostly in private hands.
In the painting, a voluptuous torch singer is accompanied by a jazz combo as she belts out a song. The pungent colors and a forceful composition of diverging diagonals effectively evoke the music's raucous energy. So, too, does Kline's vigorous, sketchy brush technique. As Gaugh observes:
Unlike [Kline's] previous work, which had been heavily dependent on line, the [ Bleecker Street Tavern] murals are dominated by brush drawing; compositions are integrated in painterly ways that Kline had never before attempted on an easel-painting scale. He brushed in colors and values after the skeletal composition was drawn, reinforcing and pulling the figures forward through insistent contour.
Kline's brushwork would become increasingly spirited and open as he freed himself from representational form and devised the vital calligraphic imagery of his mature abstractions (see object 71.666).
JCH
 

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