Jane Frank (Jane Schenthal Frank) the American artist, was born Jane Babette Schenthal on July 25,1918, in Baltimore, Maryland, and died in Baltimore in 1986. She is known as a painter, sculptor, mixed media artist, and textile artist. A pupil of Hans Hofmann, she can be categorized stylistically as an abstract expressionist. Her paintings, many involving mixed media, are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum ("Frazer's Hog Cay #18", 1968) , the Corcoran Gallery of Art ("Amber Ambience", 1964), and the Baltimore Museum of Art ("Winter's End", 1958). Additionally, she has works listed in the collections of the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, and the Arkansas Arts Center (AAC) in Little Rock (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 Theatre 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 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" (p. 16). 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 (according to Stanton, p. 9). In the following decade, while raising a family and rapidly developing as a serious painter, she also illustrated two children's books: "Monica Mink" (1948), of which she was also the author, and Thomas Yoseloff's "The Further Adventures of Till Eulenspiegel" (1957, New York).

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 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 (1958), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1962), the Bodley Gallery in New York (1963) and Goucher College (1963), among others.

She also, in 1962 (1961 according to some sources), won a Rinehart Fellowship, enabling her to study with Norman Carlberg at the Rinehart School of Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art. This might seem a sudden and late detour away from painterly pursuits, but it is really a logical step: the canvases in the 1962 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" (1968), by Phoebe B. Stanton (the art history professor emerita at Johns Hopkins University 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 1950s through the late 1960s. 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 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" (Stanton, p. 15). Indeed, "Crags and Crevices" (70"x50", oil and spackle on canvas), completed in 1961, dominated the show.

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 (Yoseloff 1975, pp. 37-39). The oil painting technique itself varies widely, from heavy daubs and stabs of the palette knife to watery or inky effects. Occasionally a very thick impasto will be peppered with minute pits, so that it looks a bit like sandstone eroded by wind-blown dirt. There are even crinkly, web-like areas which somewhat resemble (while clearly not being) batique or tie-dye. Sometimes the paint appears smeared with mud or mixed with sand, though it's hard to be sure. Later she began making irregular holes in the canvases ("windows", so to speak: one example is "Winter Windows", 1966-1967), 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 1960s, 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 aesthetic position, her chosen departure from the career-making New York scene, and the fact that her overall output was not very large (by some standards at least), 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. As Dr. Stanton (p. 29) writes: " ''...'Winter Windows' is perhaps 'sublime' in Burke's Edmund Burke'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 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. 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 lucite or aluminum, completely dispense with the earthy, gritty qualities of those "sculptural landscape" canvases, yet there seems to be no clear record of Jane Frank's thinking concerning what must have been a sharp divide in her artistic approach and aims. Perhaps making the sculptures was a less spontaneous process than painting, placing an emphasis on planning and structure over tactile engagement. The 1974 Busch book quotes Frank as saying: "I begin ^* from a drawing or cardboard mockup. I give my welding and aluminum pieces to a machinist with whom I work quite closely". Even if she worked "quite closely" with the machinist, this is clearly a very different creative process from solitary work in the studio. Nevertheless, to this writer, a palpable common element between the sculptural paintings and the free-standing sculptures seems to be a fascination with depth and shadows. She seems concerned with what happens to light when it encounters obstacles. Rather than monumental forms, imposing themselves on a space, most of Jane Frank's sculptures seem more like dreamcatchers: ingenious contraptions designed to seize fugitive visions, so that we can get a better look at them. This is further suggested by many of the titles, such as "April Screen", "Prism 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 New York's Bodley Gallery again in 1965, London's Alwin Gallery in 1971, the Galerie de l'Universit?, Paris (1972), and Towson State College (now Towson University) in 1975.

Even after 1967, when Jane Frank began making sculptures, grappling with new media such as plastics and metals, she maintained her ever-evolving production of mixed media paintings on canvas, virtually until the end of her life. Continuing her exploration of the possibilities of multiple-canvas, "windowed" paintings (she actually tended to call the holes "apertures"), she began to create her "Aerial Series" pieces, which came more and more explicitly to suggest landscapes seen from above. Especially noteworthy and striking are the "Night Landings" paintings, such as "Night Landings: Sambura" (1970), 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.

Several sources note that Jane Frank also designed rugs and tapestries; a color photograph showing a detail from one of these textile works is reproduced in the Ann Avery book listed below.

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 1950s and the 1960s. 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 60's, for all their landscape-like qualities, usually avoid anything that can be read as a horizon or a sky: we literally don't know which way is up; for as Stanton (p. 12) points out, Jane Frank - starting with "Winter's End" (1958) - 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 50's and 60's never lapse into the complaisantly decorative: there is a certain deliberate instability, often even violence, that prevents that. This quality comes through in another remark from Dr. Stanton's book. She's speaking of "Crags and Crevices," but it fits many of the works: "Nothing in the painting is still, for the big forms seem to hover in mid-air, colliding as they fall. There are provocative and startling contrasts between passages of thin, transparent paint and thick impasto, filled with striatures left by the palette knife." (Stanton, p.14).

Even 1968's "Aerial View No. 1", despite the spatial hint of the title, is far from literal. One has the feeling that the title came after the fact. But by about 1970, with the "Night Landings" paintings, there was a definite shift away from the previous decade's stubbornly refractive attitude. The "Night Landings" offer a much more definite sense of scale and viewpoint, especially with the aid of the titles. "Night Landings: Nairobi", 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 landscape that is the canvas before him" (Thomas Yoseloff, "Jane Frank: A Retrospective Exhibition", 1975: 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 1970 and after - lose some of the tension that gives the earlier paintings their distinctive power, they nevertheless address, with an intensely intimate delight, a perspective on reality which we must remember was still quite young in 1970, at least as a painterly subject. In "Aerial Perception" (1985), author Margret Dreikausen sees Jane Frank's aerial landscapes as sharing the spirit of the work of artists such as Georgia O'Keefe, Susan Crile, and others, in creating images which "reflect contemporary interest in reality," experienced from a historically new vantage point. Dreikausen insists that this art "does not merely show landscape from the air" but incorporates the "earthbound vision" into "remembered images from both spaces"Dreikausen also (p. 27) sees Jane Frank's aerial paintings as consisting of two basic types: the "day scenes" (such as "Ledge of Light") and the "night landings" (such as "Night Landing: Sambura"). The day scenes show a fascination with the play of actual shadows and false, painted ones, "inviting the viewer more closely to inspect the textures on the canvas and its 'reality' "(p.27). In the night landings, by contrast, the city is the focus, nestled in the canvas's aperture, like a precious jewel in a dark velvet box, with its "enticing twinkling lights," suggesting "the anticipation of the unknown, mysterious city.... The use of beads and glitter, partially covered with paint, conveys a sense of personal landscape" (p27). [N.B.: Yoseloff, 1975, gives the reverse of Dreikausen's dates for these two works: that is, he gives 1970 as the date for "Night Landing: Sambura" (not 1974) 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." 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