Franz Kline

Who was Franz Kline?

Franz Jozef Kline was an American painter mainly associated with the abstract expressionist movement centered on New York in the 1940s and 1950s. He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and attended Girard College, an academy in Philadelphia for fatherless boys. He attended Boston University, and later taught at a number of institutions including Black Mountain College in North Carolina and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He spent summers from 1956 to 1962 painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and died in New York City of a rheumatic heart disease.

He was married to Elizabeth Vincent Parsons, a British ballet dancer.