Mary Frank

Mary Frank (born Mary Lockspeiser ; born February 4, 1933 in London ) is an American painter and sculptor of English origin.

The daughter of the US painter Eleanore Lockspeiser and the English musicologist Edward Lockspeiser lived in London until the outbreak of the Second World War. She then attended various schools in the country and, after her parents' house in London was destroyed in a bombing, moved with her mother to live with their parents in New York.

From 1945 to 1950 she studied modern dance with Martha Graham , from 1947 she also attended the High School for Music and Art in Manhattan and from 1949 to 1950 the Professional Children's School . In 1950 she began to study wood carving with Alfred van Loen and painting with Max Beckmann at the American Art School . Between 1951 and 1954 she attended evening painting courses with Hans Hofmann . In 1950 she married the Swiss photographer Robert Frank . The marriage, which resulted in two children, ended in divorce in 1969. Their daughter died in a plane crash at the age of twenty in 1974, and their son died in 1994 of Hodgkin's lymphoma .

Frank had her first exhibition as a sculptor in 1958. Since 1968 she has worked with the Zabriskie Gallery , where, under the impression of the sculptures and ceramics by Margaret Israel , she mainly turned to working with clay. In the 1970s she was primarily recognized as a sculptor with ceramics such as Head with Ferns (1975) and Head with Petals (1976), but also worked as a draftsman, graphic artist and illustrator.

Since the 1980s the painter has become her main medium. She has received many awards for her work. After two Guggenheim grants (1973 and 1983), she received the Lee Krasner Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1993 and the Joan Mitchell Grant Award in 1995 . In 1984 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters . the Neuberger Museum of Art at the State University of New York dedicated two retrospectives to her: Mary Frank: Sculpture / Drawings / Prints (1978) and Mary Frank: Encounters (2000). Another retrospective took place in 1988 at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts ( Natural Histories: Mary Frank's Sculpture, Prints, and Drawings ). Her works can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum , the Smithsonian American Art Museum , the Library of Congress , the Art Institute of Chicago , the Yale University Art Gallery , the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston , the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and the Jewish Museum .

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• Jewish Woman's Archive - Mary Frank
• invaluable.com - Mary Frank