Franz Josef Kline 1910-1962

Franz Josef Kline was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1910. After his father’s death in 1917, the family moved to Lehighton, PA, and Kline was sent to the Girard College school for boys in Philadelphia. Kline often returned to his Pennsylvania roots in his paintings, but settled elsewhere, attending Boston University and the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. In 1938, Kline moved to New York. 

Kline found a community in New York, befriending artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who would eventually encourage Kline’s shift towards abstraction. Kline “loved New York and all the noise and confusion of life in the city” which is especially evident in his early paintings (John Gordon, Franz Kline 1910-1962). These early works, landscapes, street scenes, and portraits, were as lively and as compositionally interesting as his later black and white abstractions but rooted in the teachings of Kline’s conservative art education.

In the second half of the 1940s, however, Kline began his first experiments with abstraction. According to Elaine de Kooning’s 1962 account of Kline’s artistic ‘breakthrough’, Kline projected his small drawings into large scale with a “Bell-Opticon” (balopticon) projector, allowing him to visualize the loss and distortion of the “real” which results in the abstract. Kline moved into his mature abstraction more gradually than the account of his ‘breakthrough’ would suggest, but by 1950, he was given a one-man show at the Egan Gallery in New York which cemented his association with Abstract Expressionism.

Kline eventually returned to color, but remains best known for his black and white abstractions, "symbols of our culture, full of its strength and loneliness" (John Gordon, Franz Kline 1910-1962).