Mary Frank - Biography

Biography

Frank is the only child of American painter, Eleanore Lockspeiser (1909–1986) and English musicologist and art critic, Edward Lockspeiser (1905–1973). During World War II, Mary was sent to live in Brooklyn, New York with her maternal grandpartents, Gregory and Eugenie Weinstein. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham from 1945 to 1947 and was admitted to the High School for Music and Art in New York. In 1949 she transferred to the Professional Children's School where she majored in dance. She met Swiss photographer, Robert Frank, whom she married in 1950. About this time she studied wood carving at Alfred van Loen's studio. She also studied drawing with Max Beckmann at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York and briefly with Hans Hofmann in 1951 and 1954 at Hofmann's Eighth Street School. By this time she had two children: Pablo (named after Picasso) born February 7, 1951, and Andrea, born April 21, 1954. After her husband, Robert Frank, gained a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955 she travelled with him and the children the following two years across the United States.

In 1969 Mary began her relationship with the Zabriskie Gallery in New York. Inspired by the sculpture and pottery of Margaret Ponce Israel Mary began working in clay. She divorced Robert Frank in the same year. In 1973 she purchased a summer home in Lake Hill, New York and built her first kiln.

On December 28, 1974 her 21-year old daughter, Andrea was killed in a plane crash in the Guatemalan jungle. About a year later Pablo developed Hodgkin's lymphoma and he died on November 11, 1994 in Pennsylvania. She presently lives and works in Lake Hill and New York City. Since 1995, she is married to Leo Treltler, pianist and music scholar.

Mary Frank's career spanned 5 decades. She was largely self-taught and never had any formal training as a sculptress. She was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1984, the recipient of numerous awards and honors including two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship Awards in 1973 and 1983, the Lee Krasner Award of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1993 and the Joan Mitchell Grant Award in 1995.

Currently she has works included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Art at Yale University and the Jewish Museum.

She has also produced many paintings and works in various other media (especially printmaking). Her works are in New York's Whitney Museum, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and many others.