Attributed to Franz Kline, no coa,private collection, medium: oil measurements: 34"WX42"H framed, mint condition Biography: Franz Kline was an American painter. He is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Kline's first one-man show took place on October 16 – November 4, 1950, at the Egan Gallery, 63 East 57th Street. The show consisted of eleven abstract paintings. In the early 1950s, his work looked very much inspired by french painter Pierre Soulages who exhibited in Betty Parsons gallery in New York in 1949. Color was a rare element in the paintings: brown underpainting near the bottom of Nijinsky and fleeting hints of green in Leda. The paintings displayed a variety of compositions and moods, but they all had one defining trait: Kline's signature style of black on white. Thirteen years earlier in London, Kline had called himself a "black and white man" but not until this show had the accuracy of this phase become clear to others. Because of Kline's impact and his concrete style, Kline was dubbed the "black and white artist", a label which stuck with the artist, and which he would occasionally feel restricted by.Kline's first one-man show was a pivotal event in Kline's career as it marked the virtually simultaneous beginning and end of Kline's major invention as an abstract artist. At the age of forty, Kline had secured a personal style which he had already mastered. There were no real ways for Kline to further his investigation; he only had the potential to replicate the style he had already mastered. To move on, there was only one logical direction for Kline to go: back to color, the direction he was headed at the time of his premature death from heart failure.