Background
Frank was born in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, on July 25, 1918.
2425 Old Court Rd, Baltimore, MD 21208, USA
Jane Frank attended the progressive Park School of Baltimore.
1300 W Mt Royal Ave, Baltimore, MD 21217, USA
Frank received her initial artistic training at the Maryland Institute of Arts and Sciences (now known as the Maryland Institute College of Art), receiving a diploma in commercial art and fashion illustration in 1935.
66 5th Ave, New York, NY 10011, USA
Frank acquired her further training at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now known as the Parsons School of Design), from which she graduated in 1939.
2425 Old Court Rd, Baltimore, MD 21208, USA
Jane Frank attended the progressive Park School of Baltimore.
1300 W Mt Royal Ave, Baltimore, MD 21217, USA
Frank received her initial artistic training at the Maryland Institute of Arts and Sciences (now known as the Maryland Institute College of Art), receiving a diploma in commercial art and fashion illustration in 1935.
66 5th Ave, New York, NY 10011, USA
Frank acquired her further training at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now known as the Parsons School of Design), from which she graduated in 1939.
Jane Frank in her studio.
Frank was born in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, on July 25, 1918.
Jane Frank was a pupil of Hans Hofmann, a German-born American painter who both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism. Jane Frank attended the progressive Park School of Baltimore and also received her initial artistic training at the Maryland Institute of Arts and Sciences (now known as the Maryland Institute College of Art), receiving a diploma in commercial art and fashion illustration in 1935.
Frank acquired her further training at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now known as the Parsons School of Design), from which she graduated in 1939. In New York, she also studied at the New Theatre School.
In 1962 she won a Rinehart Fellowship; it enabled her to study with Norman Carlberg at the Rinehart School of Sculpture at Maryland Institute College of Art.
Ar first, Frank worked in advertising design and also acted in summer stock theatre. She began painting seriously in 1940, devoting much of her time to her oeuvre. Prior to 1940, Jane Frank had been involved in commercial art and when she began painting seriously, she had to "put behind me everything I had so carefully learned in the schools." She began her study of the history of painting and, going from cave painting through the Renaissance, then concentrating on Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and Willem De Kooning.
She returned to Baltimore in 1941. After her marriage, Jane Frank put aside painting, concentrating on her family. She returned seriously to producing her artworks in 1947. The following decade, she illustrated three children's books, including Monica Mink (1948), Thomas Yoseloff's The Further Adventures of Till Eulenspiegel (1957), Jane Frank's Eadie the Pink Elephant, her own book.
Twice in her 20, Frank suffered from illnesses which "interrupted the work for long periods." The first of these catastrophes was a car accident in 1952. It required multiple serious surgeries and her rehabilitation took a lot of time. The second was a "serious and potentially life-threatening illness." It developed soon after her 1958 solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The latter illness was so severe, that Jane Frank ceased painting for about two years.
Nevertheless, the late-1950s were extremely fruitful for Jane Frank as a serious painter. She worked for a period in 1956 with the prominent abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. That mentoring became her great source of inspiration. She soon had personal shows at the Baltimore Museum of Art (1958), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1962), the Bodley Gallery in New York (1963) and Goucher College (1963).
Her preoccupation with space was apparent even before her artworks became frankly "sculptural" in their use of mixed media. She later explained, "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, her work "Crags and Crevices", finished in 1961, dominated the show.
Soon after her Corcoran Gallery solo show, Frank started to apply not just spackle but a variety of other materials to her abstract expressionist paintings, including sea-weathered or broken glass, charred driftwood, pebbles, crushed graphite or silica, and even glued-on patches of separately painted and encrusted canvas (canvas collage). "I wanted work that was painterly but with an actual three-dimensional space," she later wrote. Jane Frank's first personal exhibition at New York City's Bodley Gallery (1963), as well as her 1965 one-woman show at Baltimore's International Gallery, featured many of these mixed media paintings.
Later on, Jane Frank started to make irregular holes in the canvases, or "apertures", as she called them. Perhaps, the earliest example was her "Winter Windows", which she created in 1966-1967. By producing these holes, she disclosed deeper layers of canvas (so-called "double canvases" - and sometimes "triple canvases").
Before the late 1960s, the artist was less interested in colour than in tonality and texture, often employing the grayscale to create a sense of depth or of motion from light to dark. But her later paintings showed a growing interest in vivid colours. This is especially true for her "Aerial View no. 1", one of the artist's favourite artworks, painted in 1968. In the late 1960s, Frank turned toward the creation of sculpture, grappling with new media such as plastics and metals.
There were more individual exhibitions at venues, including New York City's Bodley Gallery and Morgan State University, both in 1967, Goucher College in 1968, London's Alwin Gallery in 1971, the Galerie de l'Université, the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1975, and also a major retrospective at Towson State College (now Towson University) in 1975.
Even when Jane Frank began making sculptures, she continued to create her mixed media paintings on canvas virtually until the end of her life. She began her work on "Aerial Series" pieces. The "Night Landings" paintings worth special attention, particularly her "Night Landings: Sambura" (1970). Several sources also note that Frank designed rugs and tapestries.
Jane Frank is mainly renowned for landscape-like, mixed-media abstract paintings. Among her best-known artworks are the following: Winter's End, Amber Ambience, Crags and Crevices, Frazer's Hog Cay #18, Allar, Web of Rock, etc.
Frank won the Sculpture Prize at the 1983 Maryland Artists Exhibition.
Jane Frank's paintings and mixed media works on canvas are held in both private and public collections, including 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 the Evansville Museum.
Frank's sculptures can be found in different public collections, including Towson State University.
Jane Frank preferred to create her own landscapes or vocabulary of shapes and patterns. However, it was rock and mineral substances, their veins and surfaces, projections and infinite hollows, that sparked her particular fantasy - also beach wood, well worn with time, that was to be found on the water's edge. Issues of space had always been one of her prime concerns as well, and those substances related most closely to this concern. These then were the metaphor.
As for the quality of interiority in her works, she explained that it was an attempt to penetrate the surface of an object, presenting not only the outside but what occurs within - the essence or core.
Quotations: "The artist must create his own space, of his own time and personal vision. The result is not a unique image for the sake of 'newness', but rather for the sake of the artist, who must be concerned with it daily. These days are spent quite alone."
Jane Frank married Herman Benjamin Frank in 1941. Her husband was a builder and he constructed their home, including a studio for his wife.
