Attributed to Franz Kline, no coa, private collection, medium: oil, measurements: 39"H X30"W framed, mint condition Biography: Franz Kline was an American painter. He is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. It is widely believed that Kline's most recognizable style derived from a suggestion made to him by his friend and creative influence, Willem de Kooning. De Kooning's wife Elaine gave a romanticized account of the event, claiming that, in 1948, de Kooning advised an artistically frustrated Kline to project a sketch onto the wall of his studio, using a Bell–Opticon projector.Kline described the projection as such."A four by five inch black drawing of a rocking chair...loomed in gigantic black strokes which eradicated any image, the strokes expanding as entities in themselves, unrelated to any entity but that of their own existence."As Elaine de Kooning suggests, it was then that Kline dedicated himself to large-scale, abstract works and began developing his personal form of Abstract Expressionism. However, even though Willem de Kooning recalls that Kline delved into abstraction "all of a sudden, he plunged into it", he also concedes that it took considerable time, stating that "Franz had a vision of something and sometimes it takes quite a while to work it out." Over the next two years, Kline's brushstrokes became completely non-representative, fluid, and dynamic. It was also at this time that Kline began painting only in black and white. He explained how his monochrome palette was meant to depict negative and positive space by saying, "I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important." His use of black and white is very similar to paintings made by de Kooning and Pollock during the 1940s.There also seem to be references to Japanese calligraphy in Kline's black and white paintings, through his exchange with the Japanese avant-garde calligraphy group Bokujinkai and its leader Morita Shiryu, although Kline later denied that connection.Kline's first one-man show took place between October 16 and November 4, 1950, at the Egan Gallery, 63 East 57th Street, and consisted of eleven abstract paintings. 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.In the early 1950s his work appeared very much inspired by French painter Pierre Soulages, who had exhibited in Betty Parsons' gallery in New York in 1949. In the late 1930s in London, Kline had called himself a "black and white man", but not until the Egan Gallery 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 by which he would occasionally feel restricted.