FRANZ KLINE
Wilkes-Barre (USA), 1910 – New York,(USA) 1962 

After finishing his studies at the Art Students League in Boston in 1935, he continued his training at Heatherley’s School of Art in London, where he remained until 1937. He moved to New York, where he worked as a shop window designer, illustrator and muralist, while at the same time developing figurative work for which he was awarded two prizes by the National Academy of Design in New York in the early forties. In 1943 he met Willem de Kooning, whose influence was first perceptible soon afterwards in drawings and small-format oil-paintings in which he gradually eliminated the elements that were not essential to the composition. With Philip Guston and Bradley W. Tomlin among his friends, in 1947 he began to move towards abstraction, transferring his drawings –many made on pages from telephone books- to canvas by means of a technique of direct enlargement of opaque images, which he explored with De Kooning. By 1950 his abstract language seemed to be perfectly defined: large dimensions, the exclusive use of black and white, and geometrical forms that recalled oriental calligraphy. That year he took part in various group exhibitions –Black and White: Paintings by European and American Artists; Young Painters in US & France with Soulages at the Sidney Janis Gallery- and also his first solo exhibition, with exclusively abstract work, at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York. Very soon afterwards he began to be in demand to give courses –Black Mountain College in 1952, the Pratt Institute from 1953 onwards- and talks. His work began to be shown outside New York –in Boston in 1952, and at the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1954.

In the second half of the fifties his compositions gained greater density and impact and colour began to appear, especially at the end of the decade. In 1956 he represented the United States at the XXVIII Biennale di Venezia, an experience that he repeated in 1960. This enabled him to become known in Europe, as also did his inclusion in the travelling exhibition The New American Painting, organised by the MoMA in 1958. He died in New York City due to rheumatic heart disease.