Franz Kline

"It is widely believed that Kline's most recognizable style derived from a suggestion made to him by his friend and creative influence, Willem de Kooning. A romanticized interpretation of events by Elaine de Kooning   described how in 1948, Willem de Kooning  advised an artistically-frustrated Kline to bring in a sketch to his studio and project it onto a wall with a Bell-Opticon projector. Kline described the projection as such:
"A four by five inch black drawing of a rocking chair...loomed in gigantic black strokes which eradicated any image, the strokes expanding as entities in themselves, unrelated to any entity but that of their own existence." 
As Elaine de Kooning suggests, it was then that Kline dedicated himself to large-scale, abstract works. Over the next two years, Kline's brushstrokes became completely non-representative, fluid, and dynamic. It was also at this time that Kline began only painting in black and white. He explains how his monochrome palette is meant to depict negative and positive space by saying, “I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.  His use of black and white is very similar to paintings made by de Kooning and Pollock during the 1940s. There also seem to be references to Japanese calligraphy in Kline's black and white paintings, although he always denied that connection^{." -Wikepedia}