Attributed to Franz Kline, no coa, private collection, medium: oil measurements: 23"wx30"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 was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a small community in the Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. When he was seven years old, Kline's father killed himself. During his youth, he moved to Lehighton, Pennsylvania, where he graduated from Lehighton High School. His mother later remarried and sent him to Girard College, an academy in Philadelphia for fatherless boys. After graduation from high school, Kline studied art at Boston University from 1931 to 1935, then spent a year in England attending the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. During this time he met his future wife, Elizabeth V. Parsons, a British ballet dancer. She returned to the United States with Kline in 1938. Kline's artistic training focused on traditional illustrating and drafting. During the late 1930s and early 1940s Kline worked figuratively, painting landscapes and cityscapes in addition to commissioned portraits and murals. His individual style can be first seen in the mural series Hot Jazz, which he painted for the Bleecker Street Tavern in Greenwich Village in 1940.The series revealed his interest in breaking down representative forms into quick, rudimentary brushstrokes.The personal style he developed during this time, using simplified forms, became increasingly abstract. Many of the figures he depicted are based on the locomotives, stark landscapes, and large mechanical shapes of his native, coal-mining community in Pennsylvania. This is sometimes only apparent to viewers because the pieces are named after those places and objects, not because they actually look like the subject. With the influence of the contemporary New York art scene, Kline worked further into abstraction and eventually abandoned representationalism. From the late 1940s onward, Kline began generalizing his figurative subjects into lines and planes which fit together much like the works of Cubism of the time.