Untitled
1998

Stoneware
13.75 x 16.25 x 5 in.
Gift of Richard W. Gold from the Arthur J. Williams Collection
2024.12.25

Mary Frank is a British and American visual artist who works as a sculptor, ceramicist, painter, printmaker, photographer, draftswoman, and illustrator. Frank studied dance with Martha Graham until she married the photographer Robert Frank and switched from dance to art. Though began sculpting in wood, in 1969 Frank made her first work in clay—the medium for which she is best known. Frank sidestepped conventional techniques, folding and forming large figurative terra cotta sculptures of fragmented women. Frank arranged large pliant slabs of clay (fired raw; no glaze) creating legs and torsos, sometimes with stain to facet a bone. These larger than life disjointed figures were displayed and photographed in nature. Frank's Untitled (1998), bears resemblance to her most well-known works, including the same raw terra cotta surface, superb draftsmanship, and striations in the stain.

Frank was born in London, the only child of American painter, Eleanore Lockspeiser (née Weinstein; 1900-1986), and English musicologist and art critic, Edward Lockspeiser (1905-1973). In 1939, she left London for a series of boarding schools and then was sent in 1940 to live with her maternal grandparents in Brooklyn, New York. She studied modern dance from 1945 to 1950 and was admitted to the High School of Music & Art in New York in 1947. While in high school, she met Robert Frank, a Swiss photographer, whom she married in 1950 (they later divorced in 1969) and shortly had two children. Frank currently lives and works in upstate New York.

Billie Sessions, PhD.

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This object has the following keywords:

• male
• Motion