1000 Museums

American painter Franz Kline was born May 23rd, 1910 in Pennsylvania. He attended Boston University from 1931 to 1935 where he studied painting and drawing. After studying drafting and illustration at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London (1937-38), Kline returned to New York where he was introduced to abstraction by Willem de Kooning. Kline was keen to explore abstraction with small black-and-white brush drawings. Thanks to de Kooning’s experimentation with a Bell-Opticon projector (used to project enlarged photographs and drawings onto walls for murals or to project sketches upon a canvas), Kline was able to see his small works as grand ideograms, starting his journey into Abstract Expressionism.