Frederick Kann was a painter, sculptor and photographer. Born in Czeckoslovakia in 1886 and immigrated to the United States in 1910, his career, however, was made in Paris where he lived from 1927 until 1936. While there, he became a member of various artists associations including the American and European Abstract Artists Group, was the first American to teach at the Louvre Schools and exhibited in the finest galleries with Kandinsky, Calder, Mondrian, and Delaunay.

Kann was very popular in Europe and received substantial publicity from well-known critics of the day including Henry Miller who lived in Kann's studio. Miller wrote, "There is a great deal of mystification in Kann's abstract paintings, a curious blending of the mathematical and the introspective. Without transition he jumps from the most rigid academism to a strange no-man's land which is not even Surrealism."

Kann later returned to the United States and in the 1940's exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and at the Guggenheim. He also became a pioneer in organizing exhibitions of avant garde artists such as Man Ray. He also became a well-respected teacher in Kansas City and Los Angeles and eventually established his own school in California, the Kann Institute of Art. Kann's work has been lost since his death in 1965. It was only recently that his paintings have been discovered.