Attributed to Franz Kline,no coa, private collection, medium: oil, measurements: 21"HX25"W framed, good condition Biography: Franz Kline was an American painter. He is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. 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.