WILLIAM KLEIN

Photographer, painter, filmmaker and graphic artist, William Klein is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

He was in New York on 19 April 1926 to a Hungarian family. He grew up in Manhattan and studied sociology at the City College of New York. After graduating he did his military service in the army: a year of occupation in Germany and a year at the Sorbonne. In 1947, demobilised in Paris, William Klein devoted himself to painting. After a brief period in André Lhote's studio, he studied for a longer period in Fernand Léger's studio. That same year, he fell in love with and married Jeanne Florin, with whom he lived and worked for more than fifty years and had his only child, a son Pierre Klein.