Kline in Bridgehampton, New York, 1964. Franz Jozef Kline (May 23, 1910 - May 13, 1962) was an American painter mainly associated with the abstract expressionist movement centered around New York in the 1940s and 1950s. He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and attended Girard College, an academy in Philadelphia for fatherless boys. He attended Boston University, and later taught at a number of institutions including Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He spent summers from 1956-62 painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His best known abstract expressionist paintings are in black and white. He re-introduced color into his paintings around 1955, though he used color more consistently after 1959. He died of a rheumatic heart disease in1962 at the age of 51.