Jane Frank

Jane Schenthal Frank (born Jane Babette Schenthal ; * July 25, 1918 ; † May 31, 1986 ) was an American artist who gained fame as a painter , sculptor , illustrator and textile artist . Her landscape-like abstract paintings are in numerous public collections, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art , the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum . Frank was a student of Hans Hofmann and Norman Carlberg .

Life

Commercial arts training

Jane Frank attended the progressive Park School (when she was still called Jane Schenthal) and received her first artistic training at the Maryland Institute of Arts and Sciences (now known as the Maryland Institute College of Art, MICA for short), where she graduated in 1935 applied arts and fashion illustration. She then moved to New York City and attended the Parsons School of Design (then New York School of Fine and Applied Art ), where she graduated in 1939. In New York, Frank also studied at the New Theater School .

The beginnings of painting

Frank began to paint seriously in 1940. In a letter to Thomas Yoseloff , she wrote that her background prior to 1940 was entirely in the applied arts and when she seriously devoted herself to painting, she had to get over everything that she was so careful in the school acquired. She began with a study of the history of painting and went through a development of spatial conceptions from the Renaissance to Cézanne , Picasso and De Kooning .

Marriage, Family and Children's Books

After she returned to Baltimore, she married Herman Benjamin Frank in 1941. Jane Frank previously worked as an applied artist for department stores and advertising agencies but gave up her applied arts career for marriage and family. After the marriage, she signed her works exclusively with "Jane Frank" without ever adding her maiden name or the middle initial. Her husband, an architect, built their common home and studio for his wife. It was not until 1947 that Jane Frank turned back to painting. In the following decade, while she took care of family and household, Frank illustrated a total of three children's books: In 1948 the book Monica Mink appeared with verses written by Frank himself. In 1957 she illustrated Thomas Yoseloff's The Furter Adventures of Till Eulenspiegel and in 1986 a third book was published entitled Eadie the Pink Elephant , in which Frank wrote and illustrated the text himself.

Health problems and recovery

Between 1947 and 1967 Frank fell ill twice, which interrupted her career. The first phase of the illness resulted from a car accident in 1952, which required various operations and a long convalescence. The second phase was a life-threatening illness shortly after she was able to host a solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1958.

From the remaining 1950s to the late 1960s

Encounter with Hans Hofmann and rediscovery of the "sculptural landscapes"

After Frank recovered from her injuries in the traumatic car accident in 1952, she studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1956. His mentorship gave her inspiration and courage. This was followed by solo exhibitions in the Baltimore Museum of Art (1958), in the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1962), in the Bodley Gallery in New York (1963) and at Goucher College (1963).

In 1961, Frank won the Rinehart Scholarship which enabled her to study with Norman Carlberg at the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Frank already dealt with sculpture in 1962, where she exhibited works such as "Crags and Crevices" and "Rockscape II", which already show a sculptural tendency. But Frank's preoccupation with questions of space was recognizable early on in her paintings, in which she always used different media.

The combination of different materials and painting techniques

Shortly after the solo exhibition in the Corcoran Gallery came to an end, Frank began not only to apply putty to her canvases, but also applied various materials - weathered or broken glass, charred driftwood, pebbles, apparently crushed graphite or pebbles and even stuck-on spots that had been painted separately and encrusted canvas - on their abstract expressionist paintings. These "canvas collages", similar to those made by Lee Krasner in the 1960s, were exhibited by Frank in 1963 at the Bodley Gallery in New York City and in 1965 at the International Gallery in Baltimore.

"Openings" - multi-layer canvases

Frank later began to incorporate irregular holes in the canvases (so-called "openings", as she called them). The earliest example of this series of works is called “Winter Windows” (1966–67), whereby it revealed deeper layers of painted canvas (so-called “double canvases”) with painted “false shadows”. As a result, the third dimension was increasingly evoked, tactile and sculptural effects were created, while still adhering to the convention of the framed, rectangular oil painting. Jane Frank has worked out a method, which is not described in detail, to stiffen the often jagged edges of the canvas openings in order to maintain their shape and evenness. These creations are a type of "sculpted canvas," although obviously they wanted to be very different from the sculpted canvases of Frank Stella and others more commonly associated with the term.

In much of her late 1960s work, Frank seemed less interested in color than in tonality and texture, often using shades of gray to create an impression of depth or movement from light to dark, often on a diagonal move (as in “Winter's End”, 1958) and otherwise just use a basic tone (as with the earthy reds in “Plum Point”, 1964). The later, "windowed" paintings, on the other hand, show a greater interest in lively color relationships. This applies in particular to the “aerial photographs”, an early and monumental example of which is “aerial photograph no. 1” (1968). This painting is now in the collection of the Turner Auditorium Complex of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University.

Missing classification

While these highly complex and laborious constructions (Frank often called them “three-dimensional paintings”) they went far beyond the vocabulary of improvisational, so-called action painting , which is usually associated with American Abstract Expressionism , they also had next to nothing with pop Art and minimalism that were en vogue in the New York art scene of the 1960s. In addition, they bore little resemblance to the cheerful color field paintings by Morris Louis , Helen Frankenthaler or Mark Rothko . Whether brooding or exuberant, the (so to speak) geologically deposited, broken, eroded and hollowed canvases by Jane Frank stand out from others through their overemphasis on the geomorphic. This aloof aesthetic position, her chosen departure from the career-boosting New York scene and the fact that her oeuvre was not very large were sufficient factors that limited her career and her contemporary influence on the stage of the American art world.

After 1967: sculptures and further developments of the “opened” paintings

Sculpture: depths and shadows, reflections and refractions

In the late 1960s, Frank turned to free-standing sculpture. These were clear in their lines and surfaces, often made of smooth Plexiglas or aluminum and Frank completely renounced the earthy, grainy qualities of these sculptural landscapes. As a model, she often used cardboard as a first step and worked with a metal specialist for welded and aluminum parts. In the following solo exhibitions in 1967 at the Bodley Gallery in New York City, at Morgan State University (1967), at Goucher College (1968 for the second time), at the Alwin Gallery in London (1971), at the Galerie de l ' Université in Paris (1972), at the Philadelphia Art Alliance Museum (1975) and not least in her retrospective at Towson State College (1975) she was able to exhibit these sculptures. Frank also won the 1983 Maryland Artists Exhibition Sculpture Prize.

Landscape painting from the air

Even when Frank began making sculptures in 1967 and dealt with new media such as plastics and metals, she maintained her constantly developing production of paintings in mixed media on canvas practically until the end of her life. She continued her exploration of the possibilities of “open” paintings on multilayered canvas and began creating her “Aerial Series” works that evoke more and more explicit landscapes from above. Particularly remarkable and striking are the "night landings", such as B. the “Night Landings: Sambura” (1970), on which the city grid shimmers from above like a dark jewel in a deep, midnight blue river valley. Frank has also designed carpets and tapestries.

Jane Frank died on May 31, 1986 in Towson , Baltimore .

Collections

Frank's paintings and multimedia works on canvas include the Corcoran Gallery of Art , the Smithsonian American Art Museum , the Baltimore Museum of Art , the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University , the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock and Evansville Museum housed.

Her sculptures can be found in public collections, including those at Towson State University .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ American Association of University Women (Ed.): Baltimore County women, 1930-1975 . The Sunpapers, Baltimore 1976, pp. 16 .
2. ^ Phoebe B. Stanton: The Sculptural Landscape of Jane Frank . AS Barnes, South Brunswick 1968, p. 9 .
3. ↑ ^{a b} Phoebe B. Stanton: The Sculptural Landscape of Jane Frank . AS Barnes, South Brunswick 1968.
4. ^ Joan M. Marter: The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2011, pp. 511 .
5. ↑ ^{a b} Thomas Yoseloff: Jane Frank. A retrospective exhibition . AS Barnes, London 1975.
6. ↑ Ann Avery: American Artists of Renown, 1981-1982 . Wilson Publishing Co., Gilmer 1981.
7. ^ Virginia Watson-Jones: Contemporary American Women Sculptors . Oryx Press, Greenwood 1986.