Franz Kline, one of the most celebrated painters of the twentieth century, once described his hometown as a little Dutch settlement wrapped up in a cloud of coal dirt …
He was referring to Lehighton, Pennsylvania, a railroad town nestled amid mountains rich with quartz and anthracite coal. And like the mineral deposits, Kline’s later action paintings are infused with energy. The black-and-white lines command the kind of tension that transforms coal into diamonds, and single works have sold for over forty million dollars.

Franz Kline in Coal Country is the first biography to examine Kline’s formative years in Lehighton, Philadelphia, Boston, and London, before he became a founding member of the New York School, the ragtag group who stole the art world away from Paris after WWII. This book, according to Kline’s sister, Dr. Louise Kline-Kelly, sets the record straight in more than one place. Compiled over three decades, Franz Kline in Coal Country also contains over 100 of his earliest drawings, cartoons, letters, photos, paintings, and linoleum-block prints. Most of these little-known works, rescued from the attics and scrapbooks of friends, appear here for the first time.