Franz Kline is best known today for his minimalist black and white canvases, but prior to becoming one of the innovators of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the United States, Kline worked on a series of small commissions in and around downtown New York City.

Kline was born in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, but his mother and father were immigrants of England and Germany respectively. In 1917 when Kline was just seven years old, his father committed suicide, and his mother was quick to the Philadelphia school Girard College, an institution for fatherless boys. Throughout his life, Kline would refer to Girard as an “orphanage”, suggesting the school left a negative imprint on him. Eventually he left to attend Boston University and the Boston Students’ Art League, but in 1936, he decided to study in England at the Heatherley School of Fine Art. In 1938, he moved back to America and into an apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, where he befriended Willem de Kooning, who would later on have a great influence on Kline and his artwork.

Kline frequented the Manhattan hotspot The Cedar Bar. The Cedar Bar was a well-known hangout for members of the New York School of painters, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and E.J. Gold as well as Kline himself, in the 1950s. Today the bar is still situated at its original location on University Place in New York City. The mid-1950s saw prosper for Kline, who for years had lived on a day-to-day basis with his wife. In 1952, the MoMa acquired a handful of his works, and in 1955, the Whitney Museum bought Mahoning. Prices for his canvases increased dramatically. Unfortunately, Kline would not live to see the full extent of his influence on the art world; in 1962, he died of long-term rheumatic heart troubles.

Kline’s early works from his first years back in America after 1938 were mostly commissions for small taverns and clubs in Manhattan. His well-known Bleecker Street Tavern murals were painted in 1940. Kline was paid five dollars a piece, plus canvas, to execute ten works featuring provocative women, circus performers, and jazz musicians. He also painted other scenes of burlesque and circus performances, some of an erotic nature. This circus scene bears a whimsy equated to that of Seurat’s own famous Circus and of Toulouse-Lautrec. His sparing use of black to depict shadow could also be an homage to those French Post-Impressionists. Interestingly enough, he would go on to be most highly regarded for his shocking and dramatic use of black in his later works.