Mary Frank

Born in 1933 in London, Mary Frank moved to the United States with her family in 1940. She studied with artists Hans Hoffman and Max Beckmann. Frank is a sculptor, painter, photographer, and ceramic artist. In 2014, she came to speak about her work at the Harvard Ed Portal. Presence, a large bronze sculpture of a woman’s head, was installed at Harvard Business School in 1989. In her 1990 biography Mary Frank, art historian Hayden Herrera described how the work came to be: “When [Mary Frank] closed up the Lake Hill house and returned to New York in the fall of 1985, she left a large clay head drying in her studio. The temperature dropped below freezing, causing cracks to open on the sculpture’s cheeks and forehead. When she returned the following spring, she watched the cracks lengthen and move toward the woman’s eyes and mouth. ‘They had their own beauty,’ Mary recalls, ‘but I knew I would have to destroy the piece. One day the sculptor Alan Siegel dropped by and suggested that I cast it. So I did. I never would have thought of it myself.’ Head tilted back, eyes closed, lips open, the woman, like Persephone [another sculpture for Frank’s from the period], offers herself to and imbibes the world around her. For all her fleshy substance, the vivid blue patina makes her seem a concretization of air” (p. 191).