Jean-Michel Frank

Jean-Michel Frank (28 February 1895 – 3 August 1941) was a French interior designer known for minimalist interiors decorated with plain-lined but sumptuous furniture made of luxury materials, such as shagreen, mica, and intricate straw marquetry.

Jean-Michel Frank was born in Paris, a son of Léon Frank, a banker, and his wife and cousin, the former Nanette Frank. He was a first cousin of Otto Frank and, therefore, a first cousin, once removed, of the diarist Anne Frank.

From 1904, he attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris. He began law school in 1911, but in 1915, he was hit by the double blow of the deaths of his two elder brothers, Oscar and Georges, on the front lines of World War I and that of his father who committed suicide. In 1928, he lost his mother who had been in a Swiss asylum for several years. From 1920 to 1925 he traveled and visited the world. In Venice he met the cosmopolitan society that gathered around Stravinsky and Diaghilev. Around 1927, Eugenia Errázuriz revealed to him the beauty of 18th century styles and her own modern, minimalist esthetic, and he became her disciple.

He then got in contact with a Parisian decorator called Adolphe Chanaux to do his apartment in the Rue de Verneuil. During the 1930s he worked with students at the Paris Atelier, now known as Parsons Paris School of Art and Design, where he developed the famous Parsons Table. In 1932, with Chanaux, he opened a shop at #140 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. This was to be the consecration of ten years of collaboration, when he decorated for the Rockefellers and Guerlains. He designed Nelson Rockefeller's lavish Fifth Avenue apartment in New York in 1937. During the winter of 1939-40, he left France for Argentina.

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