Franz Kline (1910–62) was an American Abstract Expressionist. He studied painting at Boston University and illustration at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London before moving to New York City in 1938. Kline initially painted landscapes of his hometown of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, interior scenes, and traditional cityscapes, as well as commissioned murals and portraits. But friendships with Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock influenced his style, and by the end of the 1940s Kline was projecting small black and white brush drawings he’d made onto his studio wall, transforming them into large-scale ideograms. His work from this point forward was characterized by bold gestural strokes of fast-drying black and white enamel. The poet and curator Frank O'Hara called Kline the quintessential “action painter” because of the energy and movement expressed through his work.

In the late 1950s, Kline produced a series of monumental “wall paintings” and began working with bold colors. His work was included in numerous international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1956, 1960); Documenta, Kassel, West Germany (1959); São Paulo Biennial (1957); and Whitney Annuals and Biennials (1952, 1953, 1955, 1961). At the peak of his career, in 1962, Kline died of heart failure. The short-lived Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, DC, organized a memorial exhibition (1962). Kline has also been featured in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York (1968); Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (1979); Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio (1985–86); Menil Collection, Houston, Texas (1994); Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain (1994); and the Castello di Rivoli–Museo d’arte contemporanea, Italy (2004–05). 

His work has been featured in a number of GRAY exhibitions, including Paintings from a Modern and Contemporary Masters, 1992; Forty Years, 2003; Private American Collection, 2003; and GRAY at 60, 2023.