While his paintings often seemed to be the outcome of an intuitive, intense moment, they were carefully planned, as his sketches display. Though he experimented with color throughout his career, Kline is best known for his paintings executed in black-and-white tones, as well as for his spontaneous, gestural style. He later became a member of the New York School, a group of Abstract Expressionists who formed a circle in the 1940s and 1950s, including amongst others artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko or Robert Motherwell. Influenced by Willem de Kooning, he turned towards abstraction in his work at the end of the 1940s. Kline began his career as a painter in New York after leaving London, depicting urban landscapes and other subjects with a naturalistic technique. He first studied art at Boston University from 1931 to 1935, and then in London at the Heatherley School of Art from 1937 to 1938, where he concentrated on illustration and drawing. Franz Kline (American, 1910–1962) was a painter born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
