Frederick Franck; bizarre Times (London) obit
Hyfler/Rosner
April 12, 1909 - June 5, 2006
Dentist, writer and artist inspired by Zen and
the Pope
THE AUTHOR of Open Wide, Please!, Frederick
Franck has a unique place in dentistry. Inspired by work
with the Alsatian theologian, musician, philosopher and
physician Albert Schweitzer, an encyclical from Pope John
XXIII and the writings of Suzuki, he abandoned teeth for
art - with an emphasis upon Zen. In resurrecting an old mill
in upstate New York from beneath a dump, he created a
notable site for exhibitions, theatre and sculpture.
This corner of America reminded him of the Dutch
border town of Maastricht, where he was born in 1909. An
early memory was of the German assault upon Visé, a few
miles away in Belgium, in August 1914. His shopkeeper
parents were emphatically agnostic but he was nonetheless
beguiled by the extraordinary Catholic images all around.
Franck resisted the temptation to become a Catholic, but did
ask a Protestant to baptise him on the quiet. By now his
relish of art encompassed Vermeer and Vlaminck, but his
parents insisted that he study medicine.
Dutifully he did so, in Amsterdam and Antwerp.
By 1929, however, he sensed the return of war. Disturbing
memories from his childhood of the dead and wounded meant
that he wanted no part of it. He had America in mind, but
after his father's death he assured his mother that he would
remain closer, and so took a further degree in Edinburgh in
1936 at the Royal College of Surgeons (where Schweitzer
lectured), and worked with Basque refugees and among the
poor in South Wales. Later in the decade, after Melbourne
where he was solaced by Simenon's books, he reached America.
Further study, at Pittsburgh in 1942, revealed
that dentistry brought free time for art. He later said:
"Once I thought I wanted to possess all the women in the
world . . . then, fortunately, I discovered that I could do
with a limited number and just wanted to draw them all."
For 20 years he lived in Greenwich Village (in
the studio once inhabited by Poe), accompanied by Claske van
der Drift whom he would marry in 1960. Several days a week
he went to a smart Upper East Side dental practice, as
described in the humorous "autodentobiography" published in
1957. That year, a well-connected patient said that he would
be appreciated by Schweitzer at Lambarene, Gabon in Africa.
Franck, who had again heard Schweitzer lecture (at Aspen on
Goethe), said:
"When shall I go?" This offered a change and a
fresh opportunity to draw. In 1958 he and Claske flew to
Africa, which he described in Days with Albert Schweitzer
(1959). It neither portrays the 84-year-old man as a saint
nor goes in for that "long-distance psychologising" by which
many tried to debunk Schweitzer's efforts. People and
animals spring to immediate life in the book. "Contrary to
myths about the settlement," he writes, "in three months I
saw only one tiny scorpion, neatly put outside in a towel."
As for the food, he notes that "it is hard to forget that
you are eating a crocodile who would no doubt have preferred
it the other way round". He captures Schweitzer hard at work
into the night at his desk, talking at dinner and thumping
out hymns on an out-of-tune piano.
Franck drew prolifically, seeing drawing as "an
act of love which even animals sense. Something in the
artist and the monkey makes wordless contact." Such
creatures as hippos, whose "jolly rotundity give a wrong
idea of their active and resentful little brains" also
figure in a children's story about the place: My Friend in
Africa (1961).
Franck's dental work had such an effect that two
years later, he traversed Africa to lecture on modern
dentistry. From this came African Sketchbook (1961), with a
preface by Graham Greene, who recognised in his eye for
detail and sense of the grotesque a kindred spirit. In its
varied subjects, from the price enacted to forgive adultery
to cannibalistic stews, it is a dense and vivid chronicle.
Back in New York, Franck was due to meet a
publisher but he read The New York Times's report of Pope
John XXIII's opening address at the Second Vatican Council.
This beacon of optimism while horrors were blowing in the
wind led him to forget the meeting and fly to Rome, hoping
for permission (duly granted) to draw those gathered for the
debates.
In 1963, soon after the Pacem in Terris
encyclical, the Pope died, and that day Franck received news
of a papal medal for his drawings. He immediately left for
Rome, and spent many hours between Bernini's columns - above
the crowd - and drew the dead pontiff:
"To me the fulfillment of the entire
potentiality of man, the greatest man of my century."
Franck stayed on for the Conclave, and both
visits were described in the highly entertaining Outsider in
the Vatican (1965). On giving up dentistry, and inspired by
the changing Catholic spirit he had seen in Rome, he
returned to the Netherlands for a year. There, using
questionnaires, he produced Exploding Church (1969), in
which he documented the clergy's liberal inclinations.
This was less vivacious than Franck's other
books, which include the large-format My Eye Is in Love
(1963) about the art of drawing, which gives free rein to
his Topolski-style line-and-wash work and sagely offbeat
commentary, touching on such topics as the shape and soul of
cows and Manhattan buildings, "not intended to be much more
enduring than a tent".
In 1959 he and Claske had discovered the mill
buried on a six-acre dump at Warwick, and bought it for
$800. It was celebrated with EveryOne, published in the
handwritten, illustrated format which Franck had begun with
his The Zen of Seeing (1973); typesetting, he said, would
spoil what is in effect a love letter to the human spirit.
Such quests informed The Christ-Buddha (1974), about a
journey to the East, including a visit to the Dalai Lama;
The Awakened Eye (1980); Art as a Way (1981), and To Be
Human Against All Odds (1991).
If these worthy and even inspired sentiments can
be hard to take in bulk, there is no doubting Franck's urge
to inspire others with that relish for life exemplified in
the upstate home he named Pacem in Terris. There he
developed a skill in sculpture, using steel, glass and wood,
and these have also been installed in museums around
America.
He is survived by his wife and their son.
Frederick Franck, dentist, writer and artist,
was born on April 12, 1909. He died on June 5, 2006, aged
97.
Bill Schenley
> Frederick Franck
> April 12, 1909 - June 5, 2006
> Dentist, writer and artist inspired by Zen and the Pope
Here is Frederick ...
http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/shimages/playpen/frederickfranckhome.jpg
http://www.nonduality.com/16306.jpg
(w/his wife, Claske, in 2002)
... and here is his art ...
http://www.nonduality.com/16306.jpg
http://www.codhill.com/art/venice.jpg
http://www.askart.com/AskART/photos/SKN342005/622.jpg
http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/binary/82006-273-1/art_pic-3323.jpeg
http://www.kdc.kun.nl/erasmusplein/2-2000/franck2.jpg
http://www.dogamentary.com/blog/uploaded_images/HAND-780089.jpg
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/Images/schweitzer%20art%205.jpg
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/Images/schweitzer%20art%202.jpg
(Albert Schweitzer)
http://www.kdc.kun.nl/erasmusplein/2-2000/franck.jpg
(The dead Pope)
http://www.nonduality.com/16303.jpg
(Saint Francis)
Here is an srticle from the National Catholic Reporter about Franck ...
Frederick Franck at 95: The Artist As Icon-Maker
FROM: The National Catholic Reporter (September 24th 2004) ~
By Sally Cuneen
At age 95, artist Frederick Franck has come to see his work in a new light:
"I think I've been making icons all my life and didn't know it," he recently
told me over the phone.
The revelation seemed problematic, for Franck is in no way a painter in the
traditional mode of icons or iconographers. True icons, rooted in the
earliest liturgy and worship of Eastern Christians, are made by those who
are believers, and their creation is performed according to strict rules as
a kind of prayer. Franck, on the other hand, calls himself an unaffiliated
Catholic and Buddhist. Moreover, the materials, methods and uses of icons in
the Byzantine, Greek or Russian style are all mandated by tradition right
down to the boards, gesso, egg tempera, gilt and colors, but Franck's
drawings and paintings are often impulsive and original, and his metal
sculptures are constructed in a contemporary style and employ contemporary
material and technology.
Yet in their vision and aims, the ancient iconographer and the living artist
seem to agree. Eastern Christian traditions, both Orthodox and Catholic,
have continued to demonstrate that the image is also a word, a participation
in mystery and an expression pointing to its meaning. Franck agrees that
revelation is possible not only in the Word of the Bible, but also in the
image of the human. As the second-century Eastern patristic formula phrases
it, God became human so that we might become divine.
With this in mind, I went to see Franck recently to remind myself of the
work that has grown out of his lifelong passion for seeing and to discover
if his claim that his pieces are icons might have some justification in a
world where people are still seeking sacred space and sacred meaning. A new
exhibition of Franck's work will be on display at Yale's School of Sacred
Music Sept. 20-Oct 22. I was eager to reconnect with the artist I had
interviewed nine years earlier for a book I was writing on Mary (Franck has
created many contemporary Madonnas) and whose drawings, paintings and
sculpture are in museums around the world.
He is almost totally deaf and his eyesight is going, but his energy remains
astonishing. The many recent canvases around us demonstrated that he still
paints or draws almost daily. I sat down on a wooden chair in the small
upstairs room at Pacem in Terris, his "transreligious" home-chapel-sculpture
garden in Warwick, N.Y, which he shares with his wife Claske.
Almost immediately Franck launched into one of his innumerable stories that
make me think long afterwards about what they really mean. Soon he was
telling me about his design for a processional cross for the Cathedral of
Antwerp in his native Holland. It replaced a 15th-century cross that had
disappeared, and the idea came to him to make a cross of olive wood
sprouting with silver branches supporting the face of Christ as a living
presence. "The 15th-century mystic Nicolas of Cusa saw it in all faces,
'veiled as in a riddle,'" he said.
Then, leaning forward, he said passionately, "This cross of the Resurrection
is to be carried through the clouds, not nailed to the wall."
Franck spoke of his anger at the exploitation of sadomasochistic images to
the neglect of the life-affirming Resurrection. That anger, he said, came to
him through having lived in a century of such terrible suffering.
The suffering began for him as a boy of 5 in his village of Maastricht when
he watched the Kaiser's armies invade nearby Belgium. From his attic window,
he saw a nearby town burn, felt his own house tremble from the boom of field
guns and watched endless files of wretched people fleeing.
At the end of World War II, Franck painted a large five-panel sequence
called "Requiem for the First Half of the Twentieth Century." The middle
panel contains a huge semi-abstract face streaked with red and black bearing
the sorrow of both victims and perpetrators of the barbaric destruction,
whose smaller faces surround his in the other four panels; it was called
"Agnus Dei."
"Art seems intimately linked to religion in your perspective," I said.
"Isn't that unusual, considering your father was an agnostic?"
"Yes, he and my grandfather both, but they were deeply committed to justice
at a time when socialism was just emerging. They hated the cruelty of Dutch
colonialism. Not having the agnostic temperament at all, I absorbed the
Catholic symbolism all around me. I looked at the lovely hometown church in
Maastricht, the 13th-century Our Lady Star of the Sea, built on the
foundations of a Roman temple. I didn't go in--I just looked at it from the
outside, but there were always processions going on. For me it was
wonderful: the Gregorian chant, the statue of Mary, candlelight, and above
all the sacrament of the Eucharist as it was carried through the streets to
the sick."
He was immensely moved by the way passersby would kneel and make the sign of
the cross when they saw the priest coming. He began to cross himself as a
child and continues to do so, for he sees it as an instinctive response to
the mystery of the universe.
"I think I began to understand, even if it took me 60 or 70 more years to
realize it, that there is one overarching mystery; I would call it the
mystery of existence--that we are here at all and able to think and talk
about this."
When he was about 12, Franck developed a symbol of his own; he now calls it
his first icon. In the local newspaper he had seen a photograph of an almost
2,000-year-old carving of a stone fish unearthed from the catacombs and
learned that the fish was a symbol of Christ. The image mingled in his mind
with a phrase he had often heard and loved but did not understand: the
Mystical Body of Christ. And one evening in his imagination, he saw a cosmic
fish rise behind the basilica of Our Lady and move in the direction of
Orion. Each of its scales bore a human face.
"Through the years I have drawn the Cosmic Fish, painted it, engraved it,
sculpted it in stone, in wood and steel, fired it on stained glass," said
Franck.
"Still, I never caught the Fish; it caught me."
It was perhaps the first clear signal that art was his true vocation. But
that vocation was not easily followed, for his family, particularly his
mother, had other plans: He was to become a successful doctor like his
uncles.
"I didn't dare to offend my mother. So I went to the University of Utrecht
at 17 to study medicine, which didn't interest me at all, and I sabotaged
everything," he said.
Franck audited lectures on Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism and the arts. He read
books on Zen. He painted and drew throughout these student years, having
switched to dentistry because it gave him more time to do so.
He managed to get three degrees, one from the Royal College of Surgeons in
Edinburgh, as well as a teaching job in oral surgery in Pittsburgh, all the
while painting passionately. His first one-man show in New York was in 1942,
and many others would follow. After his service in World War II for the
Dutch-East Indies government in Australia, he settled in New York, opened a
dental practice and continued to paint. In Amsterdam in 1955, working on his
first book, he met a serious young woman who responded to things--saw
things--just as he did. In a few months, Claske joined him in his rundown
loft on Bleecker Street.
They would abandon his practice temporarily in 1958 when they heard that Dr.
Albert Schweitzer, a childhood hero of Franck's, needed an oral surgeon in
his clinic in Gabon. For three years Claske improvised the role of a nurse
while Frederick drained abscesses and performed operations on the steady
stream of patients who arrived in dugout canoes at Lambarene. And all the
time, he made drawings of them, the jungle and the good doctor, which can be
seen alongside his adventures in his Days with Albert Schweitzer and African
Sketchbook. They are among more than 30 books Franck has written.
When they returned to his New York practice, Frederick and Claske ventured
out on weekend drives and one day fell in love with the wreck of an old
hotel on the Wawayanda River in Warwick, which they impulsively bought for
$800. A Dutch windmill maker who lived nearby restored it to last 100 years.
But something happened once again to call the couple away, and this time to
change their lives permanently. On Oct. 12, 1962, Franck saw a photo of Pope
John XXIII on the frontpage of The New York Times and read the speech he
had. given at the opening session of the council he had convoked:
"The aim of the Second Vatican Council is to consolidate the task toward the
unity of humankind.... The council now beginning rises in the church like
daybreak."
Franck felt he had heard the Spirit speak. He cancelled his appointments and
telephoned Claske that they must go to Rome. He had to draw that old man who
spoke with such wisdom and compassion.
In Rome, Franck was told it would be impossible to gain entrance to the
council, but with the help of one of Claske's relatives who was a
bishop--and a bit of skullduggery--he did. Wearing a black suit and hat and
carrying a black portfolio, he confidently walked in with a bishop's arm
around his shoulder and stayed to draw the council members during all four
sessions.
After Franck had seen and drawn John in many different situations, he
observed in his book, Watching the Vatican: "Only very, very rarely have I
seen a face that--fully alive --showed the human in all its greatness,
without a trace of falsity or pretense. It was in the face of Angelo
Roncalli; better known as Pope John XXIII, that I saw this pure beauty of
the Spirit. He was a fat man, not handsome, but beautiful, for he was a
genius of the heart ... maskless."
Working in his studio on the night of April 12, 1963, he heard over the
radio a summary of John XXIII's encyclical Pacem in Terris--a powerful plea
to all people of the earth to work for peace and justice. Frederick saw the
pope in his mind's eye and instantly drew what he saw using the pipette of
his ink bottle. No prepared board with gesso, no traditional egg tempera
paint or gilt halo, but nevertheless an icon of a saint.
Less than two months later he heard of the pope's death. That night the
couple flew again to Rome, and Frederick was able to draw John once more on
his bier, "a dead man who was not dead to me, and never would be."
Franck's first impulse upon returning home was to turn the old Stone mill
across the river from their house into a chapel called Pacem in Terris, "a
garbage dump turned into a sanctuary, for once, instead of the other way
around." He began to create sculptures for it, something he had never done
before, including one of John XIII that is prominent in the finished chapel.
Now the old mill became his canvas. Beginning in 1966 and continuing to the
present, professional artists have conducted a series of classical chamber
music concerts in the chapel, where the high wooden roof creates exceptional
acoustics. In the two sculpture gardens that slowly grew around the house,
many other figures began to appear, and they now number about 70.
Signs of the aesthetic influence from Franck's contact with Eastern
religions are evident not only in particular sculptures such as the Kwan-yin
Madonna carved out of wood but in the simplicity of most of his work. In the
small house that was built to contain his stained glass Stations of the
Cross, his Tao of the Cross is joined by 10 windows depicting the ancient
Eastern parable of the Oxherd.
Each station was painted in vitreous enamels and silver stain, then fired in
a kiln to bond the color to the glass. The colors are subdued, not the
bright blues and reds of Chartres but grays and earth colors, conducive to
meditation. The 10 windows depicting the spiritual progress of the Oxherd
were drawn and then painstakingly transferred to glass. They consist of
three layers of glass, the outer one in black and grays, the second etched,
the third slightly sandblasted to produce a translucent, subtle texture when
they are sandwiched together.
Eastern influence is also visible in Franck's later work in metal,
encountered in different places on the grounds. One such piece came about
after a trip to Hiroshima. There he had seen burnt into a wall the shadow of
a man whose shape he carved out of a large piece of black metal. Looking
through the empty human space, the positive man who was carved out can be
seen rising in the distance. Franck calls it "The Unkillable Man" or,
sometimes, "Resurrection."
Franck's inspirations often mingle memory with vision. A seven-foot steel
Madonna is a direct descendant of the medieval virgin he knew as a child,
whose cloak opened to reveal Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In his rendition,
her long metal cloak opens to reveal the Original Face, a Buddhist concept
that, for Franck, merges with the Face of Faces. "For me, she is the person
who can accept and contain that face, her son's and her own. Her face is
blank because she is potentially every woman, every man," he said.
In the winter of 2004, he was looking again at his "Requiem" painting from
the '40s, which was included in a Poughkeepsie, N.Y., retrospective. Franck
had not seen the "Agnus Dei" for decades, but as he looked at this suffering
countenance, he realized that he had portrayed the Face of Faces long ago.
"I still find it surprising, for I never thought of my work as iconic," he
said.
At least since the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea invited artists to
create icons: "Arise now before me, you iconographers of the saints'
merits," he urged, believing like the other great Eastern Fathers that both
writing and painting transmitted the word of God, one to the ear, the other
to the eye.
In his constant quest to reveal the divine in nature and in humans, Franck
has responded to that invitation.
So often responding to impulse and chance, Frederick Franck has yet managed
to live and work in a way that is faithful to the intense mystic "vision of
his childhood. It is remarkable to look back at his early painting, trace
his growing mastery and the expansion- of his subject matter, and finally
discover the unity of purpose his works convey.
Hyfler/Rosner
"Bill Schenley" <stra...@ma.rr.com> wrote in message
news:EBmtg.33205$u11....@tornado.ohiordc.rr.com...
> ... And not just a little bizarre ...
>
>> Frederick Franck
>> April 12, 1909 - June 5, 2006
>
>> Dentist, writer and artist inspired by Zen and the Pope
>
Thanks for all the links. We had obits for the guy in June,
but somehow the London Times captured him in a way that made
me sit up and take notice.
Steve Miller - A Famous Rock Star!
As good a lede as I can imagine.
--
Steve Miller
Editor and Chief Copyboy
Goodbye! The Journal of Contemporary Obituaries - http://www.goodbyemag.com
If in NYC, buy the Sun and read the obits!