Jane Frank
Jane Schenthal Frank was an American multidisciplinary artist, known as a painter, sculptor, mixed media artist, illustrator, and textile artist. Her landscape-like, mixed-media abstract paintings are included in public collections, including those of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She studied with artists, Hans Hofmann and Norman Carlberg.
Work
Jane Frank was a pupil of the painter, Hans Hofmann. She can be categorized stylistically as an abstract expressionist, but one who draws primary inspiration from the natural world, particularly landscape. Her later painting refers more explicitly to aerial landscapes, while her sculpture tends toward minimalism. Chronologically and stylistically, Jane Frank's work straddles both the modern and the contemporary periods. She referred to her works generally as "inscapes".The early years
Training in commercial art
Jane Frank attended the progressive Park School and received her initial artistic training at the Maryland Institute of Arts and Sciences, earning in 1935 a diploma in commercial art and fashion illustration. She then acquired further training in New York City at what is now the Parsons School of Design, from which she graduated in 1939. In New York, she also studied at the New Theatre School. Her schooling complete, she began working in advertising design and acting in summer stock theatre. From the sources, it is unclear whether she worked in these fields while still in New York, or only after returning to Baltimore. We do know, however, that she began painting seriously in 1940.Becoming a painter
In a letter to Thomas Yoseloff, she wrote that "prior to 1940 my background had been entirely in commercial art" and that when she began painting seriously, she had to "put behind me everything I had so carefully learned in the schools". She began a study of the history of painting and "went through a progression of spatial conceptions" from cave painting through the Renaissance, then concentrating on Cézanne, Picasso, and De Kooning. "I was also much concerned with texture, and heavy paint", she adds.Marriage and family; children's books
After returning to Baltimore, she married Herman Benjamin Frank in 1941. According to the biography in "Baltimore County Women, 1930-1975" listed below, Jane had previously been working as a commercial artist "for department stores and advertising agencies", but she "gave up her career in commercial art for marriage and a family". After marrying, she signed her works consistently as "Jane Frank", apparently never including a maiden name or middle initial. Her husband, a builder, constructed their home, including a studio for his wife. With the initial demands of a new marriage and family presumably beginning to relax a bit, Jane Frank returned seriously to painting in 1947.In the following decade, while raising a family and rapidly developing as a serious painter, the young mother also illustrated three children's books. Monica Mink, featured along with Jane Frank's illustrations, a whimsical text by the artist herself, entirely in verse, relating a tale in which "In rhyme the obstreperous Monica Mink 'who wouldn't listen and didn't think' is finally taught that 'all Mother Minks know best'." . Thomas Yoseloff's The Further Adventures of Till Eulenspiegel, featured Jane Frank's block prints, which already show a penchant for collage-like textural juxtapositions and strong diagonal composition. Jane Frank's 1986 obituary in the Baltimore Sun mentions that she published a third children's book, entitled Eadie the Pink Elephant, with both text and pictures by the artist, and this is confirmed in an excerpt from Publishers Weekly available online .
Health catastrophes and recovery
Art history professor emerita, Phoebe B. Stanton of Johns Hopkins University mentioned that twice in the 20 years after 1947, Jane Frank suffered from illnesses which "interrupted the work for long periods". The first of these catastrophes was a serious car accident in 1952, requiring multiple major surgeries and extensive convalescence, and the second was a "serious and potentially life-threatening illness" soon after her 1958 solo show at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The latter illness was so severe, according to Stanton, that it interrupted Jane Frank's painting work for about two years.The latter 1950s to late 1960s
Encountering Hans Hofmann, and discovering a "sculptural landscape"
Health problems notwithstanding, the latter 1950s proved decisively fruitful for Jane Frank as a serious artist. Having fairly well recovered from her injuries in the traumatic 1952 accident, she studied for a period in 1956 with the great abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and this mentoring gave her a jolt of inspiration and encouragement. She soon had solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Bodley Gallery in New York and Goucher College, among others.She also, in 1962, won a Rinehart Fellowship, enabling her to study with Norman Carlberg at the Rinehart School of Sculpture at Maryland Institute College of Art. This might seem a sudden and late detour away from painterly pursuits, but it is a logical step: the canvases in the 1962 Corcoran show, such as "Crags and Crevices" and "Rockscape II", already feature passages that are sculpturally "built up" with thick mounds of gesso.
Jane Frank's preoccupation with space was evident even before her paintings became overtly "sculptural" in their use of mixed media. Of the paintings in the 1962 Corcoran Gallery show, she tells Phoebe Stanton: "I was trying to pit mass against void and make it look as though there were passages that went way back – that's why 'crevice' is in so many of the titles". Indeed, "Crags and Crevices", completed in 1961, dominated the show.
Combining diverse materials and techniques
Soon after the month-long Corcoran Gallery solo exhibition, Jane Frank began to apply not just spackle but a variety of other materials – sea-weathered or broken glass, charred driftwood, pebbles, what appears to be crushed graphite or silica, and even glued-on patches of separately painted and encrusted canvas – to her jagged, abstract expressionist paintings. "I wanted work that was painterly but with an actual three-dimensional space", she later wrote. Jane Frank's first solo show at New York City's Bodley Gallery, as well as her 1965 solo show at Baltimore's International Gallery, featured many of these radically dense and variegated mixed media paintings."Apertured", multiple-canvas paintings
Later she began making irregular holes in the canvases, disclosing deeper layers of painted canvas underneath, with painted-on "false shadows", etc. – increasingly invoking the third dimension, creating tactile, sculptural effects while remaining within the convention of the framed, rectangular oil painting. The apertures also suggest a view into some sort of psychological interior, as though the second canvas – seen only partially, through the hole in the forward canvas – were some half-concealed secret, perhaps even another whole painting that we will never see.Stanton also notes that Jane Frank worked out a method – unspecified – of stiffening the apertures' often jagged edges so that they held their shape and flatness. These creations are a type of "shaped canvas", though very different from the shaped canvases of Frank Stella and others more commonly associated with this term.
In much of her output before the late 1960s, Frank seems less interested in color than in tonality and texture, often employing the grayscale to create a sense of depth or motion from light to dark, this frequently moving in a diagonal, and otherwise employing one basic hue. However, the later, "windowed" paintings show a sharper interest in vivid color relationships: indeed, Yoseloff notes that with the later paintings "she has gone to bolder colors". This is especially true, as he notes, in the "aerial" paintings, of which an early and monumental example is "Aerial View no. 1". This was one of the artist's favorites, according to Baltimore County Women .
Standing apart
While these highly complex and laborious constructions moved her well beyond the vocabulary of the improvisatory, so-called "action painting" usually associated with American abstract expressionism, they also had virtually nothing to do with the pop art and minimalism which were then the rage of the 1960s New York art scene. Furthermore, they bore little resemblance to the serene "color field" paintings of Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, or Mark Rothko. Whether brooding or exuberant, the geologically deposited, erupted, eroded, and gouged canvases of Jane Frank stand apart from all else. Perhaps this style could be called "geomorphic abstraction" – though no such term can be found as a stylistic category in art history books.This standoffish aesthetic position, her chosen departure from the career-making New York City scene, and the fact that her overall output was not very large, were factors that limited her career and her contemporary impact on the course of American art. Yet perhaps, as time goes on, present-day art lovers who get to know these pieces will agree with Professor Stanton that they are powerful and beautiful creations, worthy of contemplation and admiration on their intrinsic merits – regardless of what was supposedly fashionable in 1960-something:
After 1967: sculptures, and further development of the "apertured" paintings
Sculpture: depths and shadows, reflections and refractions
In the late 1960s, Jane Frank turned her energies toward the creation of free-standing sculpture, i.e., sculptures properly speaking, as opposed to "sculptural paintings" or mixed media works on canvas.The sculptures, with their clean lines and surfaces, often in sleek lucite or aluminium, completely dispense with the earthy, gritty qualities of those "sculptural landscape" canvases. Busch quotes Frank as saying: "I begin from a drawing or cardboard mockup. I give my welding and aluminium pieces to a machinist with whom I work quite closely".
There were more solo exhibitions, at venues including New York City's Bodley Gallery again in 1967, Morgan State University, Goucher College in 1968, London's Alwin Gallery in 1971, the Galerie de l'Université, Paris, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, and a major retrospective at Towson State College in 1975. She also won the Sculpture Prize at the 1983 Maryland Artists Exhibition.