Franz Kline

Siskind and Kline became close friends in the late 1940s. They lived across the street from one another in New York’s Greenwich Village.

A person like Franz – we respected each other....Certain elements of his work were ones that I had already developed, see? And when he carried it further in his own work it affected me as well. We were the same kind of people. We were little people. We were very loving people but we were also a little macho inside. And we were both developing. Developing was very important.
(Siskind, from an interview for the oral history project “Mark Rothko and His Times,” Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., October 2, 1982.)

Siskind celebrated his great admiration for the gesture in Kline’s work in a series of photographs begun around 1960, but which he focused upon most intently in the 1970s. An example from the series “Homage to Franz Kline” currently hangs in the Museum’s Works on Paper Gallery.