Franz Kline

Kline is best known as an abstract expressionist painter in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. Born in Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania, Kline attended Girard College and Boston University before moving to New York in 1938. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Kline produced figurative scenes of city life, and earned money painting decorative murals and theater sets. He turned toward abstraction in 1948 and began painting the monumental black-and-paintings for which he is known. Kline taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He spent summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts.