Franz Kline

As his new bestie convinced him to attend Black Mountain College, BMC, outside of Asheville, North Carolina.

At Black Mountain in 1951, he studied with Franz Klein, Robert Motherwell, and Ben Staun and met John Cage.

And if you've been in the art lab for a while, you will remember Black Mountain College from such months as January 2026, when we studied sculptor Ruth Asawa and she attended BMC just a few years prior to Cy's arrival.

He became Ben Shahn's favorite student, but Motherwell makes few remarks about Cy's work, except to comment that he didn't have anything to teach him.

Here, he also studied photography with Hazel Frieda Larson, and he even experimented with pinhole cameras.

It is, in fact, BMC photographer Aaron Siskind who arranged Cy's first solo show at the Seven Stairs Gallery in Chicago, where he exhibited paintings completed that summer at Black Mountain College.

His work during his time at BMC is notably influenced by artists like Franz Klein, as he tended to work predominantly in monochrome for his massive gestural paintings, as evidenced by maybe his most famous painting from the time, entitled Min Oe, and I don't know if I'm saying that right, which was 1951.

It's just a very large painting, very monochrome, some large, gestural, simple moments on this paper.

It could be like they're the law enforcement agents there.

But again, you know, almost in some ways, when he starts putting in these other structures, the bridges, the towers, the parapets, it starts to feel almost like the Mahoning, like Franz Klein, you know, these very steel hard forms that are coming in.

It's...

It's phenomenal to see how he does this.

And I quickly worked out that over a period of a year or two, that there was a museum quality collection of artworks by women only.

on the market from particularly from the 50s 40s 50s and 60s with moma labels on the back guggenheim labels on the back pictures that have been shown with betty parsons in the 50s peggy guggenheim in the 40s uh the graham gallery t-board and arch march gallery in new york and they're all these things still have the labels i mean if these were by robert motherwell or Franz Klein, let alone Mark Rothko, you know, there'd be $20 million pictures by Mark Rothko, you know, or Willem de Kooning or Pollock, there'd be $300 million pictures.

So that was how it sort of got me into that area.

One, the prices were affordable to me.

There was a letter addressed to the first curator of the gallery saying that Wright's plans for a spiral walkway and the curvilinear slope, it's called, were, quote, not suitable for a sympathetic display of painting and sculpture.

And that letter was signed by people like Franz Klein and Philip Gustav.

Yeah, Norman Mailer was another high-profile opponent.

He said that it shattered the mood of the neighbourhood wantonly and barbarically.

I mean, I mean, this is this is completely left field.

But I remember reading an interview with Alice Katz where he was talking to a student who was painting like Franz Klein.

He was like, hey, that's a great way to learn how to paint, like how to make it.

Yeah.

Throughout the early and mid-twentieth century, Paris had reigned supreme as the undisputed center of the Western art world, where galleries, salons, and critics dictated taste to the globe.

The emergence of the New York School of Painters, including Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell, shattered this European monopoly and established a bold new American aesthetic.

Propelled by institutional backing, aggressive gallery promotion, and well-funded international exhibitions, New York became the vibrant epicenter where modern art was refined, collected, and idolized by international tastemakers.

A crucial intellectual, uh, institutional ally in this grand cultural strategy was the Museum of Modern Art in New York, whose leadership and trustees maintained remarkably close ties to the national security apparatus.

There was a, a Cézanne drawing.

There was a, a Franz Kline painting.

There's a Hans Hofmann painting.

It was like my jaw fell open.