Jane Frank

Jane Schenthal Frank (born Jane Babette Schenthal; July 25, 1918 – May 31, 1986) 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.

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 (even postmodern) periods.

She referred to her works generally as "inscapes".

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).

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.

Jane Frank (when she was still Jane Schenthal) attended the progressive Park School and received her initial artistic training at the Maryland Institute of Arts and Sciences (now known as the Maryland Institute College of Art), 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 (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 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.

After returning to Baltimore, she married Herman Benjamin Frank in 1941.

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, the young mother also illustrated three children's books.

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".

Monica Mink (1948), featured along with Jane Frank's illustrations, a whimsical text by the artist herself, entirely in verse, relating a tale in which (according to the review published by the National Council of Teachers of English) "In rhyme the obstreperous Monica Mink 'who wouldn't listen and didn't think' is finally taught that 'all Mother Minks know best'."

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Health problems notwithstanding, the latter 1950s proved decisively fruitful for Jane Frank as a serious artist.

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.

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.

Thomas Yoseloff's The Further Adventures of Till Eulenspiegel (1957, New York City), featured Jane Frank's block prints, which already show a penchant for collage-like textural juxtapositions and strong diagonal composition.

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.

Indeed, "Crags and Crevices" (70"x 50", 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 (canvas collage) – to her jagged, abstract expressionist paintings.

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 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 (or "spackle", as Stanton tends to call it).

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).

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".

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.

"I wanted work that was painterly but with an actual three-dimensional space", she later wrote (Yoseloff 1975, pp. 37–39).

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.