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Jane Frank ( (the AAC link provides an image of Jane Frank's "Web of Rock"). THE EARLY YEARS Jane Frank (when she was still Jane Schenthal , of course) received her initial artistic training at the Maryland Institute of Arts and Sciences (now known as MICA, the Maryland Institute College Of Art ) and at the Park School. She then acquired further training in New York City at what is now the Parsons School Of Design (then called the New York School of Fine and Applied Art), from which she graduated in 1939. In New York she also studied at the New Theater School. Her schooling complete, she began working in Advertising design and acting in summer stock theater. From the sources, it's 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 . In a letter to Thomas Yoseloff , she wrote (quoted in Yoseloff's "Retrospective", 1975 , p.34) 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" (p.34). She began a study of the history of Painting and "went through a progression of spatial conceptions" (p.35) from Cave Painting through the Renaissance , then concentrating on Cezanne , Picasso , and De Kooning . "I was also much concerned with texture, and heavy paint", she adds (p. 35). After returning to ), of which she was also the author, and Thomas Yoseloff's "The Further Adventures of Till Eulenspiegel " ( 1957 , New York ). From this writer's research so far, it is not clear to what extent (if any) she may have continued working in advertising design after marrying. Professor Phoebe B. Stanton of Johns Hopkins University (see below) mentions 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 1950'S TO LATE 1960'S: METAPHORICAL LANDSCAPES, AND A UNIQUE APPROACH TO MIXED MEDIA PAINTINGS ON CANVAS Health problems notwithstanding, the latter 1950's 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 ( 1958 ), the Corcoran Gallery Of Art ( 1962 ), the Bodley Gallery in New York ( 1963 ) and Goucher College ( 1963 ), among others. She also, in Corcoran show, such as "Crags and Crevices", already feature passages that are sculpturally "built up" with thick mounds of Gesso (or "spackle", as Stanton tends to call it). The single best source on Jane Frank is "The Sculptural Landscape of Jane Frank" ( who died in 2003 ). Dr. Stanton's text provides a scholarly and perceptive guide to Jane Frank's life and work, and there is a helpful and liberal use of quotations from the artist herself, enabling the reader to understand how Frank's thinking evolved, especially from the late 1950's through the late 1960's . The book (out of print but still in many public and university art libraries) also contains a wealth of biographical information and many large plate reproductions of the artist's works, some in color. There are also photographs of the artist. Jane Frank's preoccupation with space was evident even before her paintings became overtly "sculptural" in their use of , dominated the show. Soon after the month-long - 1967 ), disclosing deeper layers of painted Canvas underneath (so-called "double canvases"), 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. In much of her output before the late 1960's , Frank seems less interested in color than in tonality and texture, often employing the gray scale ( Grayscale ) to create a sense of depth or of motion from light to dark, this frequently moving in a diagonal (as in "Winter's End", 1958 ), and otherwise employing one basic Hue (as with the earthy reds in "Plum Point", 1964 ). However, the later, "windowed" paintings show a sharper interest in vivid color relationships, especially the "aerial" paintings, of which a magnificent example is "Aerial View no. 1" ( 1968 , 60 inches by 84 inches, collection of the Turner Auditorium complex at the Johns Hopkins School Of Medicine , Johns Hopkins University ). 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 1960's New York art scene. Whether brooding or exuberant, the (as it were) geologically built-up canvases of Jane Frank stand apart from all else. Incidentally, it must be admitted that this standoffish 's] use of the word for a kind of beauty which produces sensations of awe and helplessness.... Part of the power of these pictures is the result of their controlled design, for balance, color, texture, have been managed so economically that the least change would throw the whole out of key." ''' AFTER 1967: SCULPTURES, AND FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE "WINDOWED" PAINTINGS In the late 1960's , 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. Oddly, the Stanton book contains no mention of these, though its chronology (p.31) mentions Jane Frank's 1968 solo show at Goucher College , and the sculptures date from 1967 on, according to Yoseloff's 1975 "Retrospective". Fortunately, we have "A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960's" by Julia M. Busch (1974), which contains many images of Frank's sculptures, a number in color. The sculptures, with their clean lines and surfaces, often in sleek no. 2", and "Shadows of Substance". Julia M. Busch also calls attention to this quality with her remark that "Jane Frank's Acrylic constructions cast brilliant Stained-glass shadows through the play of light and color" (p. 26). There were more solo exhibitions, at venues including ( 1972 ), and Towson State College (now Towson University ) in 1975 . Even after ), with the city grid glinting below like a dark jewel in a deep, nocturnal blue river valley. The 1975 Yoseloff retrospective catalogue listed below is very illuminating on these latter developments, and the color plates (which include images of some of the sculptures) are of higher quality than those in the Stanton book. Jane Frank died in 1986 . In some sources, her place of residence is listed as Owings Mills, Maryland , which is a near suburb of Baltimore . The 1986 Watson-Jones book's entry on Jane Frank, available at the "Questia" link given below, states her address as "1300 Woods Hole Road Towson, Maryland 21204". Towson is another near suburb of Baltimore. In addition to consulting published sources on the artist, I have relied on direct access to the work and on conversations with several persons who provided additional insights or memories, including a Washington, D.C. , art expert, a surviving family member, a longtime Baltimore gallery owner, and a longtime Baltimore bookstore owner. CONCLUDING DISCUSSION OF JANE FRANK'S WORK AS A WHOLE Finally, if I may, I would like to reflect on the various sources I have consulted, together with my own observations, concerning the overall character - the personality, so to speak - of Jane Frank's art, especially the works on canvas of the late 1950's and the 1960's . This is certainly an open subject, but I think there are plenty of solid clues on which to base a substantive discussion. There is a strong feeling of the Solitarian in many of these pieces before 1970. They are wild and unpeopled. It is ironic that someone trained in Advertising and Acting would create such an emphatically unsocial body of work. They radiate an intense aloneness: we are in direct contact with the primal forces, and no one of the slightest importance, not even the artist, is there. Thus Stanton writes that " Landscape " is for Jane Frank a way of conveying ideas which (to Stanton) recall Heidigger 's definition of Poetry , which included "the recreation of the experience of standing 'in the presence of the gods and to be exposed to the essential proximity of things' " (Stanton, p.8). These works are at once sensually compelling and incorporeal - "out-of-body", so to speak. And as Julia M. Busch points out, even the sculptures avoid reference to anything recognizably, bodily human. Stating that Frank's sculptures are "environmental", Busch goes on to define this term in a way that points to the quality I speak of: "Environmental sculpture is never made to work at exactly human scale, but is sufficiently larger or smaller than scale to avoid confusion with the human image in the eyes of the viewer." (Busch, p. 27). Also, the canvases of the ) - avoids horizontal orientation in favor of strong diagonals. Furthermore, in this painting, as in many others of the next decade, scale is undecidable. Stanton, again speaking of "Winter's End", writes: "One is given no indication of the size of the scene; the way through which winter passes could be either a mountain gorge or a minute water course" (Stanton 1968 , p. 12). Plenty of cues are there that this is some sort of Landscape , and Frank herself avows it: "The beginning of my efforts to make my own statement, I would trace to my first visit to the Philips Gallery.... Landscape was a natural metaphor, and so it is still for me today, in my three-dimensional double canvases" (Jane Frank, in a letter to Yoseloff, quoted in Yoseloff, 1975 , p. 37). It's a Landscape , yet we simply cannot orient our bodies in relation to it. However intrigued we may be, we're not invited. "It's not about you; it's not even about me," the artist seems to say. This banishment of anything overtly corporeal or human can be read, of course, as a radical expression of the Feminist yearning for " A Room Of One's Own " in the midst of a society that insists a woman be defined by her body and by her relations with others, especially husband and family. And certainly, the Abstract Expressionists as a group are often charged with rejection of the human. But this flinty aloofness is also quintessentially American, especially when applied to the notion of Landscape . What is more American, for example, than a typical automobile advertisement depicting you, in your highly desirable vehicle, utterly alone in some vast, craggy rockscape? Jane Frank, trained in the seductions of Advertising , has simply eliminated the only thing wrong with this picture: you - you, with your stuff and your needs. What's left is something typically so ambiguous - as to scale, vantage point, and explicit content - that the viewer can hardly make out what it would even mean for a person to enter this world - though it clearly is some sort of brutal natural world. These pieces of the late ." (Stanton, p.14).''' Even ", however breathtaking it is (and it is), is not disorienting in the least: we know where we are, we know we're in a plane, we know the plane is landing, and we even know roughly what time it is - and look! - there's the city, and there's the water! Furthermore, the fact that we see a city down there means that - at least implicitly - there are ''people'' in this painting. Yoseloff, in his 1975 "Retrospective" book, enthuses: "Perhaps the ultimate achievement in the direction in which Mrs. Frank has been tending is her series of "night landings".... Now, more than ever, the viewer is deeply involved, and he can feel himself carried downward into the : pp.18-20). Ah yes, Mr. Yoseloff: but what if we didn't want to come down? The pre- 1970 canvases, for all their visceral attractions, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night . That the "Night Landings" apparently do is perhaps a good or a bad thing, depending on each viewer's sensibility. If these more literal aerial landscapes - created in ) and 1974 as the date for "Ledge of Light" (not 1970 ). Yoseloff's dates seem to comport better with other information, and so it seems probable that Dreikausen somehow got them reversed.] The 1999 Benezit book's entry on Jane Frank takes it as a given that her works on canvas may be summarized as semi-abstract aerial views: "Sa peinture, abstraite, fait cependant reference a un paysagisme aerien, comme vu d'avion." ["Her paintings, though abstract, nevertheless make reference to aerial landscapes, as viewed from an airplane." As an overview of Jane Frank's work, this oversimplifies - even to the point of falsification; but it must be remembered that Frank did not exhibit in Paris until 1972. The French, ''ainsi dire'', got only a distant, aerial view of Jane Frank's ''oeuvre''. But one really ought to go in for a closer look. BIBLIOGRAPHY/SOURCES note: For the researcher's convenience, I have externally linked these titles (where possible) to Worldcat's "Find in a library" service. Simply follow the instructions there to find a copy of the book in a library near you. Where a Worldcat link was not available, I have given links to listings for copies offered for sale. I include these not for commercial purposes, but only to help verify the existence of the book and to give the reader another source of information about it. 1. Avery, Ann (ed.), "American Artists of Renown, 1981-1982" one '''color plate image''' of a Jane Frank work, along with a bio (Wilson Publishing Co.: Gilmer, Texas, 1981) 2. Benezit, E. (ed.), "Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, desinateurs, et graveurs de tous les temps et tous les pays" and Documentary Dictionary of Painters, Sculpters, Draftsmen, and Engravers of All Times and All Countries" , (Grund, Paris, 1999) 3. Busch, Julia M., "A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960's" '''three color and two b&w images''' of Jane Frank's sculptures, as well as some discussion of the work and several quotations from the artist (The Art Alliance Press: Philadelphia; Associated University Presses: London, 1974) 4. Chiarmonte, Paula, "Women Artists in the United States: a Selective Bibliography and Resource Guide on the Fine and Decorative Arts" (G. K. Hall & Co., Boston, 1990) on Jane Frank is on page 606 . 5. Davenport, Ray, "Davenport's Art Reference and Price Guide, Gold Edition" (2005) 6. Dreikausen, Margret, "Aerial Perception: The Earth as Seen from Aircraft and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Contemporary Art" (Associated University Presses: Cranbury, NJ; London, England; Mississauga, Ontario: 1985) '''color plate images''' of two of Jane Frank's aerial paintings . 7. Dunbier, Lonnie Pierson (Ed.), "The Artists Bluebook: 34,000 North American Artists to March 2005" (2005) 8. Frank, Jane, "Monica Mink" (Vanguard Press, 1948) book authored and '''illustrated by Jane Frank''' 9. Jacques Cattell Press, ed., "Who's Who in American Art", 1980. frank entry pp. 240-241 10. Jacques Cattell Press, ed., "Who's Who in American Art", 1984. frank entry p. 303 11. Opitz, Glenn B., ed., "Mantle Fielding's Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers" (1986) 12. Opitz, Glenn B., ed., "Dictionary of American Sculptors" (1984) 13. Saur (ed.) "Allgemeine Kunstler-Lexikon: Die Bildenen Kuntsler aller Zeiten und Volker"" Dictionary of Artists of all Times and All Peoples" (Munich, Leipzig, 2005) Jane Frank entry on page 46, vol. 44 14. Stanton, Phoebe B., "The Sculptural Landscape of Jane Frank" informative and thorough monograph including '''b&w and color plates''', 120pp. (A.S. Barnes: South Brunswick, New Jersey, and New York, 1968) 15. Watson-Jones, Virginia, "Contemporary American Women Sculptors" book is the source for the Questia external link provided below; the book's summary of Jane Frank's career emphasizes (naturally) her sculptures, properly speaking - as opposed to the paintings and mixed-media works on canvas. (Oryx Press: Phoenix, 1986) 16. Yoseloff, Thomas, "The Further Adventures of Till Eulenspiegel" book with '''block print illustrations by Jane Frank''' (1957) of Congress Catalogue Card Number 57-6892 17. Yoseloff, Thomas, "Jane Frank: A Retrospective Exhibition" exhibition catalogue amounts to another full monograph on the artist, with '''very high quality color and b&w plates''', extensive textual discussion and quotation of the artist, and much specific and detailed information on Jane Frank's life, career, and individual artworks: 51 pp. (A. S. Barnes: New York and London, 1975) EXTERNAL LINKS
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