Poet Bill Corbett discusses Franz Kline's Painting Number 2 at MoMA, exploring abstraction and personal connections

Poet and critic Bill Corbett visited the Museum of Modern Art to discuss Franz Kline's Painting Number 2 (1954) as part of a series where guests select artworks for conversation. Corbett, author of Philip Guston's Late Work: A Memoir (1998) and publisher of Pressed Wafer Books, wrote a suite of poems about Kline. He noted Kline had been an abstract painter for six or seven years by 1954, was a Cedar Bar regular, and died in 1962. Corbett shared a personal connection, having grown up near Kline's hometown of Lehighton, Pennsylvania, and recognized landscape elements like train tracks along the Lehigh River in the work. He discussed Kline's use of a Bell-Opticon projector to enlarge small drawings, often made on telephone book pages due to financial constraints, and his preference for house paint, which has caused conservation issues like cracking and yellowing. Corbett compared Kline to contemporaries like Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, mentioning their aim to merge drawing and painting. He reflected on Kline's influence on later artists such as Brice Marden, Christopher Wool, and Jonathan Lasker, and noted the painting's placement near works by Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, and de Kooning at MoMA. Corbett also touched on Kline's signature style, the importance of white spaces alongside black marks, and how the artwork evokes New York's billboard scale and cinematic references like The Sweet Smell of Success (1957).