The forever-cool photographer and filmmaker William Klein, a longtime American in Paris who I wrote about for Newsweek a couple of times, and who kindly bestowed upon me the Chevalier of Arts and Letters in 2017, died on Saturday here on the Left Bank at the age of 96. What a good, long life--and a great artistic life--he led. He studied painting with French cubist artist Fernand Leger, and later applied those techniques to his photographs, framing prints with bold primary colors of paint, as if they were big, bright wax pencil edit marks on contact sheets. Bill's feature movie "Where are You, Polly Magoo?" is an arch send-up of fashion that still plays in Paris rep houses. His documentary “Muhammad Ali, the Greatest,” which follows the boxer from his early days as Cassius Clay, through his conversion to Islam, to his epic Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman, remains the definitive account of Ali's career. My favorite work, though, was Bill's images of New York, Paris, Rome and Tokyo. As I wrote in Newsweek for his retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2006: "Klein's street photography is not sappy or romantic like Robert Doisneau's or of a particular epoch like Henri Cartier-Bresson. His pictures from New York in the 1950s meld easily with those of Paris in the 1990s, primarily because he doesn't capture a moment, he seizes the soul." I loved Bill, even at his most prickly--he became a true Parisian!--and I'll miss him greatly. Picture by @francoisgoize 📷🎞