About Hannah Frank

HANNAH FRANK

 by Gordon Casely - reproduced with permission (Appeared in the Herald Dec 27 2008)

Artist, sculptress and a last survivor of Glasgow’s Art Nouveau blossoming

ARTIST OF THE CENTURY

Born in 1908, she is the last living link to an artistic explosion that put Scotland on the creative map

By Jim McBeth of the Scottish Daily Mail, 23rd August 2008. (reproduced with permission)

SHE is frail these days, a venerable old lady with delicate hands that once created beautiful sculpture and the inimitable other-worldly drawings  that characterised the artistic fashion of her youth. As she reaches 100  today, Hannah Frank's hands are idle but then her work is done and her  honoured place in the history of Scottish art is assured as the last  living link to Art Nouveau.

Jessie M King, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, his wife Margaret and her sister Frances Macdonald, were the great stars of the decorative new movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. Glasgow led the way and
Frank, who was born in the city, embarked on a career that would span eight decades.

The simple, elongated lines of her ethereal figures defined the zeitgeist and built a bridge to the era of Modernism before she embraced sculpting - a discipline she was guided to by Benno Schotz, the great Scottish sculptor who is regarded as a giant in the field.

In a career lasting from the late 1920s to the early years of the new millennium, her work has been exhibited on three continents, an artistic legacy that makes her one of Scotland's most significant artists.

'When there is a discussion about 20th-century art, her work will always be considered,' says Sandy Moffat, the former head of painting at Glasgow School of Art, where Frank studied in the late 1920s.

His colleague, Mark O'Neill, head of arts and museums for Glasgow, which is absorbing more of her work into the civic collection, adds: 'She is a significant figure in the history of art in the city and her work is delightful.

'Hannah is undoubtedly one of Scotland's treasures and it's amazing to think that the last connection to the Glasgow Girls should be with us still.' Today, when Frank receives her birthday card from the Queen, the
redoubtable Jewish artist can look back on a long life and sparkling career. 'My ambition was to leave footsteps in the sands of time,' she says, quoting one of her favourite lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

But the diary of Hannah Frank was not always easy to write. She had to overcome prejudices that would be regarded by modern society as unthinkable. Her father was a Russian émigré, who fled persecution to settle in Glasgow in 1905. As young Hannah grew up, she realised persecution of Jews was not confined to pre-revolution Russia.

In her teenage years, the burgeoning artist suffered the routinely casual sexism and bigotry that dictated Jewish girls should not be given higher education. In spite of it, the brilliant pupil was accepted by Glasgow University, where she began studying to be a teacher, a career she gave up to become a fulltime artist. Her father, who by now was running a photographic shop at the corner of Glasgow's Saltmarket, supported her ambition but counselled her to get a career and pursue art as a sideline.

Persuading the executive of Glasgow School of Art to allow a Jewish girl to study there in the evenings presented a high hurdle. She recalls:

'There were no Jewish artists. I remember how upset my mother was, having to ask one of our neighbours - a city bailie - if he could help me get in. My mother said it was the hardest thing she ever had to do.' But the
bailie's influence worked and Frank was allowed to study.

She reflects: 'Being a woman and a Jew made me a one- off.' Among people whose religion and culture combine to assume the dimension of nationality, she could not escape her roots: 'In spite of being born in Glasgow, I regarded myself then as Jewish rather than Scottish. It was something you could not escape.' Her religion definitely added more steps on the climb to success: 'You mustn't think that Germany was the only place where people discriminated against Jews. I remember standing in a grocer's shop and hearing a couple complaining that those Jews were buying up all the fruit. But the things that happened to the Jews in Germany were especially terrible and it had an impact on my work.' Works such as 'Flight' (1939) demonstrate that dark side, with grim figures reflecting the plight of the fleeing refugees. Yet despite the gathering clouds over Europe, life for Frank, with her father, her mother and three siblings was happy.

 But she burned to be an artist and the studious girl based many of her drawing on passages from the classical poets and the lyrical language of the Old Testament.

Between 1927 and 1932, she produced fortnightly illustrations for Glasgow University magazine. It was these pen-and-ink drawings, with their echo of the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, that helped build her career.
And this week that career will be celebrated in her home town when her life and work will take centre-stage in a series of celebratory events, including a new exhibition.

An anthology of her art, Hannah Frank: Footsteps on the Sands of Time - A Hundredth Birthday Gallimaufry, was published yesterday and she is to be honoured by MSPs with a reception at the Scottish parliament.

She quips: 'I'm flattered - I hope I'm alive to see it all.' The honours are deserved, according to Gavin Wallace, head of literature for the Scottish Arts Council, who says of Frank's art: 'The dark and beautiful heart of Glasgow sang out from every work. We are delighted to celebrate an important artist.' Mr O'Neill adds: 'Hannah emerges with honours from the illustrious cluster of Glasgow Girls such as Margaret Mackintosh, Frances Macdonald, Jessie M King and Bessie McNicol. She is the sole survivor of a group who experienced at first hand the momentum of a
European art movement.

'Her drawings, even as a teenager, were similar to King. Hannah was very modern and, of course, her sculpture was influenced by the great Schotz. 'Because there were so many "stars" of the period, it is inevitable she is
sometimes regarded as less well known than them. It would be nice to redress the balance, in honour of her birthday.' Frank's pen-and-ink drawings, done between the 1920s and the 1940s, and her sculptures, dating from the 1950s to the early 2000s, are exhibited all over the world.

 But many of her early drawings have languished in suitcases. The new exhibition, which opens today, includes 17 recently discovered works dating from the 1920s.

 The artist's niece, Fiona, says: 'We've discovered many of her artworks in old suitcases. I'd noticed pieces of sugar paper and assumed they were packing material. To my amazement, they were revealed as coloured
drawings of figures.

'We think she did them during life classes at Glasgow School of Art. She used vibrant colours, quite unlike her trademark black-and white work.' Frank refers to the drawings as the 'selfish children' she never had with her late husband Lionel Levy, whom she married in 1939: 'We did not have children. That is my biggest disappointment in life. Lionel was a good man and I could find no fault with him.'

The newly discovered artworks are more precious because Frank all but gave up drawing in the early 1950s to concentrate on sculpting after being influenced by Schotz, who had seen her modelling clay.

Her sculptures are reminiscent of Schotz's unfussy forms. One work - of a woman - will also be seen for the first time in the exhibition.

Fiona Frank adds: 'It was found on top of a wardrobe. It has its arms stuck out and a big fat bottom. It looks a bit like a crucifix. When Auntie looks at it, she says, "Oh, that's not like me. It looks a bit goy-ish (non- Jewish)".' Frank may have learned from the best but she was  resolutely her own woman. She says: 'I just did what I wanted and, if people liked it, so much the better. My advice to young artists is always to do what makes them happy.' Like the work of earlier Romantics, her drawings and sculptures were inspired by Palgrave's Golden Treasury of English poetry - Yeats, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Edgar Allan Poe, whose work she learned by heart.

Frank's younger self was characterised by daydreams of 'the boys I liked who didn't fancy me. I thought I was ugly - I certainly wasn't beautiful. I knew I wasn't good-looking but, like my Jewishness, I don't really know
how much it influenced my work. 'You can't be Jewish without knowing it and thinking about it. It's not that I'm religious but it's like something that won't go away. 'There were no Jewish artists in my early days. I shunned models and always worked from imagination. The figures in my works come from poems I'd read. Sometimes, I would think of the images during a walk or in bed. I would also read the Old Testament for its beautiful and
lyrical poetry.'

Her earliest drawings were signed with a nom de plume - Al Aaraaf. It was inspired by Poe's poem about the mysterious star, discovered by Danish astronomer Tycho Brake in 1572, which appeared suddenly, attained in a few days a brilliancy surpassing that of Jupiter and then disappeared.

It is, she says, a fitting analogy of her life: 'That will do me. I had a few days of brilliancy and I'll disappear, never to be seen again.' .

Hannah Frank, a Glasgow Artist: 100th Birthday Exhibition is at the chapel of Glasgow University, Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm; Sundays, 12pm-4pm, until Oct 11  (also open 9-11 a.m. on Sat 11th October).

Article from the Jewish Telegraph (Glasgow edition) 22/8/08

What's all the fuss about, asks Hannah (reproduced by kind permission of the Jewish Telegraph)


RENOWNED Glasgow artist Hannah Frank celebrated her 100th birthday in style with the opening of a special exhibition in the chapel at Glasgow University on the eve of her big day.  The typically modest artist, the last of the 'Glasgow Girls', commented: "I don't know what the fuss is all about - I haven't done anything special."  Hannah studied at Glasgow University and the Glasgow School of Art. She produced her trademark black and white drawings from the age of 17 in 1925. Between 1927 and 1932, the Glasgow University Magazine rarely
came out without a drawing by 'Al Aaraaf', her chosen pen name.

Hannah took up sculpture in the 1950s, studying with Benno Schotz; and her drawings and sculptures were exhibited in the Royal Glasgow Institute, the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy, throughout her artistic career.  The artist continued to produce sculpture till her early 90s. In 2002, aged 94, she moved with her
husband Lionel Levy to the Westacres Care Home in Newton Mearns, where her drawings and sculpture are on show.

Hannah's niece, Fiona, has worked tirelessly to promote her aunt's work.  Speaking at the preview, Fiona said: "Five years ago I set out to do all this. The exhibition of her work has been all round the world, culminating in our ultimate goal the opening of this, my aunt's 100th birthday exhibition here today.  "I never dreamed that it would
all happen. It has been a fabulous privilege for me to get to know my aunt and read her diaries."

Welcoming the large group of guests, the university chaplain, Rev Stuart MacQuarrie, said: "The university has a reputation of always looking after its own and Hannah is very much one of us. It's a great joy to have her with us and to be exhibiting her work here in the chapel."

Also speaking was Scottish artist and sculptor Andy Scott, famous for his horse sculpture which can be seen from the M8.   Andy said: "I first came across Hannah's work a few years ago when I was doing research for a project in the Gorbals. To have come across such delicacy of touch and the amazing subtlety of her work has been
wonderful. "I'm truly in awe of her ability and consider myself to be her number one fan."

Also present at the Exhibition were Hannah's second cousin Myrle Leland and her husband Richard, who had flown over from Michigan. Myrle recalled: "On a visit to Scotland 16 years ago, we were aware of Hannah's existence, but not her great talent.  "We didn't know where she lived and tried the phone book in Edinburgh, where we were
staying, with no luck. We tried the Glasgow book and there she was and she invited us to see her. "When we walked into the foyer of her home it was covered from floor to ceiling with artwork and we asked whose
it was.  "Very quietly and unassumingly, she shrugged her shoulders and said, 'It's mine'."

One of the highlights of the exhibition, is the showing of 17 new original works of figures done in coloured pastel, which were only recently discovered by chance in a suitcase in the loft at Westacres.

As well as the exhibition a new book, Hannah Frank: Footsteps on the Sands of Time - A Hundredth Birthday Gallimaufry, edited by Fiona Frank and Judith Coyle.   The book has been published by the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre in association with Kennedy and Boyd, with support from the Scottish Arts Council.  A DVD has also been made. The Spark Divine, filmed, edited and directed by Sarah Thomas, includes Hannah's great-nieces Jen Rankin and Barbara Spevack.

Hannah's nephew, Jonathan Frank, travelled over from Boston for the celebrations. He said: "Fiona has done all the work to make this possible and it's a very proud moment for all the family.

"We're looking forward to Hannah's birthday tomorrow and it's going to be a fantastic weekend."

* Hannah Frank, A Glasgow Artist 100th Birthday Exhibition, is on at the Glasgow University Chapel, until October 11.

From The Scotsman, 8th August 2008 - reproduced by permission

Hannah at 100
by Brian Morton


As Glasgow gears up to celebrate a milestone for artist and sculptor Hannah Frank, BRIAN MORTON goes in search of clues to her remarkable creative vision.

IT MAY BE THAT SHE DIDN'T expect or plan to stick around quite as long as she has. The very earliest of her work to be seen publicly was signed "AL AARAAF". This was the name given to a star identified by the astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1572, visible for about a year and a half before it disappeared back into the black sky. It's also the name given in the Koran to a star that marks the mid-point between paradise and hell. And it's the name of the title poem of the very first collection published by Edgar Allan Poe, whose own career flared as
briefly and as combustibly as Hannah Frank's has been patient and long.

I wanted to ask one of Scotland's best-loved artists, who celebrates her 100th birthday on 23 August, why she had chosen that particular pseudonym for the poems and drawings that were published in the Glasgow University magazine GUM when she was a student there in the late 1920s. I knew from elsewhere that Poe and his failed, fractured epic had a special significance for her, but I wanted to hear it from Hannah herself. I assumed an interview would not be likely.

To my surprise, an e-mail from her niece, Fiona Frank, who has usually been present at recent media meetings but who lives in England, provided a phone number for Hannah at the Glasgow care home where she lives, alone since the death of her husband, Lionel Levy. It came with the gentle reminder that Aunt Hannah's memory wasn't all it had been.

After a good deal of hesitation, I called and had the tables sweetly but comprehensively turned. Instead of running through the usual roster of questions – influences, politics, creative longevity, Poe, Scotland as a locus in European rather than merely British art – I was gently questioned about myself. Each "I'm sorry, I don't really
remem-ber ..." was followed by a neatly connected enquiry about my own background, work, home, family and even religion. I think a too-long question about Poe and the Koran left her with the impression that I was a Muslim.

Poe is the key, though; I'm convinced. That poem, Al Aaraaf, is concerned above all with what might be called theodicy, or justifying the ways of God to man, but in a strikingly humanist way. Its main concerns are the absolute primacy of duty and the fate of those who inhabit Al Aaraaf, who are neither blessed nor damned but who fall into that ignored middle ground that in Calvinist theology is identified as the "preterite".

Frank's work down the years has reflected these concerns at the profoundest level. If she herself has been critically overlooked – though widely admired and loved – her work is also in some way concerned with the preterite, those who fall outside the heroic and tragic and who are merely human.

Her last sculpture, completed just before she retired from active making in 2000, was the plain Standing Figure, shown only in three-quarter view. It could as easily be kneeling to pray, but with an undramatic simplicity, quiet, humble, private, unaware of our gaze. It also carries just the faintest shadow of ambiguity: actually a dual
figure, it may be under some duress, kneeling before a gun rather than in front of some devotional object; or it may again be rising up out of the clay, a return of the repressed.

This doubleness of vision is evident in Frank's work from the very beginning. Her figures often have a spectral cast and are often set against cosmological backgrounds, hinting that these are figures who somehow exist not quite in the flesh and not quite enthroned in their eternal home. There is a note of melancholy in even the brightest and most sanguine of her drawings, and everywhere there is that same feeling of humility and chastened self-possession. Her figures make no claims on us beyond those of human contact. Portraiture represents only a tiny proportion of her work, not because she lacked contacts or commissions, but simply because she was never drawn to the great and the good nearly as much as she was to the middle mass. For the same reason, she does not claim to speak for the downtrodden or the victims of history, though she has had every right and reason to.

Poe merely pretended to be Jewish, in order to give his orphaned nature a certain mystique and to claim a stake in an intellectual destiny. Frank accepted her Jewish heritage straightforwardly. Poe visited Scotland only briefly with his foster father. Hannah was born here. Her father, Charles Frank, was a refugee from the Tsarist pogroms in Russia who settled in Glasgow and established a business in the Saltmarket, making and repairing cameras and other optical and mechanical instruments. Hannah was born in the Gorbals in 1908, the eldest of four children and Charles and Miriam Frank's only daughter.

In one family photo, strikingly composed, she stands behind the boys, one arm resting almost protectively on the back of her father's chair, the other spread loosely to the side, an unconsciously iconic female pose as well as a striking visual geometry. Her intelligence and personality are unmistakable.

She went to Strathbungo School and Albert Road Academy before matriculating at Glasgow University to study art. After graduating, she went to Jordanhill Training College, where "AL AARAAF" contributed more black-and-white images to the in-house magazine, the New Dominie. These are tough images, in keeping with the Art Nouveau sensibility of the time, studiously modern but also – a further connection to Poe – strikingly transhistorical. One sees echoes of icon painting and poster imagery in the work, reminders that her roots lay in a largely pre-literate culture in which imagery almost always had a didactic intent. After qualifying, she taught for a time in Glasgow's east end, but also began taking night classes at the School of Art, where she won the James McBey Prize for her increasingly bold and resonant wood-engraved prints.

Her creative destiny, though, was confirmed when she began taking sculpture classes with Paul Zunterstein and met Scotland's most distinguished sculptor, Benno Schotz. For a half century, from 1950 to her retirement in 2000, sculpture was her exclusive medium, though her drawings and engravings continued to have a currency in Jewish publications and prints.

I first encountered her work in a print on my father's office wall at Glasgow High School. Yellowed and torn at the edges, it portrayed a female figure, whose hair seemed to merge with both sky and ground, in long waves that had an almost mathematical precision. This, perhaps, is the greatest single creative legacy of her marriage in 1939 to Lionel Levy, who introduced her to aspects of modern science that melded strikingly with her own original concerns. Here again, not to push the point too hard, is a connection to Poe, whose apparent mysticism and embrace of the irrational was balanced by a profound absorption in the scientific and technical culture of his time, an element of his work, and of Frank's, that is often overlooked.

I can remember no other detail about that poster, and have been unable to identify it since, but it has been said, and my father confirmed it, that Frank's work was popular with Glasgow University students of a subsequent generation. Like Roger Dean or Storm Thorgerson later, she seemed to speak to the aspirations and dilemmas of young people who'd grown up at the outer edges of the fascist tempest.

Glasgow and Clydebank were at the limit of the Luftwaffe's effective range, but they felt the blast all the more keenly for that, and Frank's sculptural work has a quality that can best be described as"post-war". That is a subjective reaction rather than a stylistic or broadly cultural one, but it seems to work. There is little attempt to
buy into the "Art Booms with the Guns" spirit that pervaded wartime Glasgow, a sense that creative and political imperatives were met in the studio with a new vividness of perception. Instead, and typically, Frank concentrated on those aspects of the period's history that continued on into the uncertain peace where her ancestral homeland
became a new, world-threatening enemy.

Frank's politics were, like Shostakovich's, populist at heart. Her commitment was to the people of the modern Al Aaraaf, neither good nor evil, but the human equivalent of dark matter, which, as Poe intuited in his masterpiece Eureka, comprises the bulk of all there is, even if it is not seen. It has been Frank's genius to reveal it, steadily,
unflinchingly and with the most rational kind of compassion.

The long dialogue of Poe's poem Al Aaraaf, with its skyscraping philosophy and apparent other-worldliness, ends on a distinctively human note, a stanza that is often dismissed as merely a neat closing flourish. Was this what Hannah Frank responded to?

"Thus, in discourse, the lovers whiled away
The night that waned and waned and brought no day.

They fell: for Heaven to them no hope imparts
Who hear not for the beating of their hearts."

Those words seem to go to the heart of her life and work as well. Happy birthday.

• Hannah Frank: A Glasgow Artist – 100th Birthday Exhibition is at Glasgow University, 23 August to 11 October. Tel: 0141-330 5419 or visit www.hannahfrank.org.uk

A website dedicated to the work of Hannah Frank, respected Glasgow artist and sculptor. All images copyright Hannah Frank. Reproduction needs prior written permission. Contact Fiona Frank (tel/email below) with your requirements.

Please sign our Centenary Guest Book with your thoughts about Hannah Frank's art or any memories you'd like to share

Fiona Frank, tel (+44) (0)7778 737681 email  hannahfrankart@googlemail.com