This book was released a decade earlier as *The Vital Gesture* to accompany a Kline retrospective of 1985. As such, it is composed essentially as a review of the artwork, focusing on the shifts from figural to abstract painting, the mediums Kline used, the painterly techniques, and the topics of the paintings that can be discerned from what is known about Kline's life and companions. Gaugh uses an academic approach to compare the works contained within, a mix of color and B&W reproductions. The language is therefore skewed to art-historian and gallerist modes, slightly jargon-laden but generally accessible to the lay reader.
Gaugh presents the most comprehensive source of biographical information about Kline available to readers. His goal is to theorize about the art, however, and he is not presenting a biography as such. The life of the man is not the theme, but merely supporting material in analyzing the paintings. Kline's motives, formative experiences, and relationships are not surveyed except anecdotally in service of understanding the art. In this way, it not until the last quarter of the book that it is mentioned that Kline's father committed suicide when he was 7, and that he lived in a fatherless-boys' boarding school for 11 years, even after his mother remarried. Such watershed events, like the years of institutionalization of his schizophrenic wife in a state hospital, cry out for a psychological biography of Kline, particularly at a time when readers have access to detailed tomes about Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, etc. Until such time as a genuine biography arrives, Gaugh's volume is the most complete account of this well-regarded Cedar Bar habitue.
