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William Klein’s Paint and Light Show

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William Klein was late for his interview at the Howard Greenberg Gallery. Hours late. People fretted. Some shrugged. E.T.A.’s would be announced, then scratched and updated. His coat is on. He’s in a cab. He’s on the way.

Oh, wait, maybe not.

That’s fine. Mr Klein never worried about having to wait for others to catch up with him. For an artist whose creativity has been years ahead of others as a painter, photographer and filmmaker, you can forgive his temporal tardiness. And if not

Well, that reply can’t be printed.

Yet he was nothing but polite when he finally arrived at the gallery, which is featuring “Paintings, Etc.,” a striking showcase of his early work, showing the connection between his roots as a painter and his entry into photography. The photographs range from early experiments with bulbous curves of light and stark Mondrian-like barns, to sharp high fashion and blurry, kinetic street scenes.

“I had an experience that was kind of backward,” he said, explaining how as a young man working with an Italian architect he went from painting to shooting. “Instead of thinking that photography was a step down, it brought me a step up, to transpose and modify things.”

DESCRIPTIONWilliam Klein, Courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery Muhammad Ali, Miami, 1964.

That can apply to a lot of his creative output, said David Campany, a writer and curator who wrote the introduction to the catalog for the show, which was produced with HackelBury Fine Art of London.

“What you see here in this show is the very fluid interplay between what people usually see as polar opposites: abstraction and figuration,” said Mr. Campany, who also wrote the introduction for “William Klein: ABC,” published by Abrams. “Klein isn’t interested in purity. It’s not about distinguishing media. It’s about the between spaces. ome think the show is schizophrenic. But you can see a graphic sensibility that holds it all together.”

Born in New York 84 years ago, Mr. Klein was fresh out of the Army when he settled in Paris â€" where he still resides â€" and enrolled at the Sorbonne thanks to the G.I. Bill. He found his way to the studio of Fernand Léger, an “artist with a capital A,” who taught him painting. But another lesson was more important: get out of the gallery.

“He kept telling us: ‘I know all you guys are obsessed with making it. Selling your paintings. Being exhibited in some gallery.’ But let me tell you, it’s bull,” he recalled of Mr. Léger’s lessons. “What you want to do is think and investigate what the painters in Italy did in the 15th century, working with architects and thinking of mural projects.”

Mr. Klein went to Italy, where he worked with a like-minded Italian architect who had him do a series of boldly painted room dividers that could be arranged in different pa! tterns. H! e took pictures of the panels, when he asked someone to spin them.

“I got this blur,” he said. “These geometric forms, the ABC’s of an artist’s language, when you turned them, they blurred. I thought, hey, this is cool.”

He started experimenting in the darkroom with lights and blurring the image by moving the paper. In time, he returned to New York, shooting for Vogue while also pursuing his personal street photography. His street images were blurry, grainy and dark. They showed someone at ease on the streets and comfortable among its denizens. They were years ahead of his time â€" which meant American editors passed. The work would be published in Europe as “Life Is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels.” The images, layout and captions captured his take on his hometown.

“It does not have the outsider melancholy you see with Robert Frank,” Mr. Campany said. “Ther’s none of that in Klein. There is a slight misanthropy in Frank that you don’t get in Klein. Klein loves and hates everybody equally.”

He went on to do similar projects in other cities. He also embraced film, starting with one on the lights of Broadway around Times Square. He returned there recently with a BBC crew that was doing a documentary on him. What had been “a big living room” was now even more so with benches and chairs. Apart from the fact that the products being advertised were made overseas and not in the United States, little had changed.

DESCRIPTIONWilliam Klein, Courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery Black Barn and White Lines, Walcheren, the Netherlands, 1949.

“It’s still the glo! rificatio! n of American consumption of products,” Mr. Klein said. “It’s kind of contradictory that people come to film and gape at these gorgeous, blatant examples of advertising. Now you can sit on benches and be awash in these constant reminders that Kleenex is out there on the walls, thinking of you.”

The city, he found, has changed little in other ways.

“This is supposed to be the Big Apple, with neighborhoods where the houses are all good looking and the skyscrapers and everything,” he said. “But to me, New York is kind of shoddy and uncomfortable. I’m in a hotel in a chic neighborhood, Madison and 29th. If you open the shutter, the shade, the view is of a wall.”

He has also found that the attitudes of New Yorkers on the street when they encounter a man with a camera have not changed much. Back in the 1950s, he used to tell people he was the Inquiring Photographer from The Daily News.

“People didn’t object to me taking their photo,” he said. “It was something eveybody thought was their due, to be King for a Day, win the lottery and be photographed.”

And now Mr. Klein worried that people would be suspicious that their images would end up in some government database. To his surprise, he did not encounter that.

“I found New Yorkers are still as naïve and obsessed with themselves as ever,” he said. “If somebody wants to photograph them, their attitude is, well, why not me”

For an artist often described as irascible and unpredictable, he was nothing but attentive and thoughtful during the interview at the gallery. A red bandanna peeked out from under a gray sweater, and his slightly wild white hair gave him a touch of rebel authority. (Some at the gallery call him, endearingly, the Rebel Commander.)

Though slow of step, he immediately recalled our last encounter in 1996, when I took him to Mott Haven in the South B! ronx. In ! an area that others might have feared, he threw himself into the fray, taking pictures at a center for the elderly and visiting with residents of a house for recovering drug addicts. He wondered how the borough was today.

Better, I replied.

Now, in the gallery’s main room, a few people got a peek at the show, which includes enlarged portions of his contact sheets. Where a grease pencil had once circled the shot he wanted, he now had slathered bright red or yellow paint around the image, including part of the adjacent frames.

The painted contacts, which he has been doing for several decades, sum up his trajectory, employing painting, photography and a hint of movie-like editing.

“A lot of people say to the gallery, how come this guy is adding paint and abstract forms to his photographs” Mr. Klein said. “He says, ‘He’s been a painter for 40 years.’ I say I can do what I want. If you like them, that’s fine.”

And if not Well, you should know the answer.

“Yu can’t print that” he said. “That’s funny.”

DESCRIPTIONWilliam Klein, Courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery Barbershop, Rome, 1956.

Mr. Klein will be signing copies of “William Klein: ABC” on Saturday, from 3 to 5 p.m., at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406, New York. “Paintings, Etc.” will be on view there through April 27.

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