Margaret Lefranc
| Margaret Lefranc | |
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Margaret Lefranc. Photograph by Laura Gilpin.
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| Born |
Margaret Anglin Frankel March 15, 1907 Brooklyn, New York, United States |
| Died | September 5, 1998 (aged 91) Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States |
| Occupation | Modernist painter |
Margaret Lefranc (nee Frankel and later Schoonover) (March 15, 1907 – September 5, 1998) was an American painter, illustrator and editor, an American Modernist with early training as a color Expressionist and also classical training. According to the art historian Sharyn Udall, a woman "on the edge of the avant-garde." Lefranc produced portraits, figures, florals, still lifes and landscapes in a variety of compositions. Her media included oil, watercolor, gouache, pastel, drawing, etching and monotypes. At age eighteen, she received accolades from Alfred Stieglitz and, in November 1928, aged twenty-two, received rave reviews in La Revue Moderne, when her works Dancer and Mme M. en Pyjama were shown in Paris.
Margaret Lefranc, was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Abraham Frankel and Sophie Tiplitz Frankel, who were sixteen and seven respectively when they immigrated with their parents from Moscow and Tibilisi. During their marriage, Abraham owned a shirt factory, a shipping line, distributed Western films, built the Lowe's theater in Brooklyn, owned other real estate and was the first person to have a small orchestra in vaudeville. They had four children, but one son died. They spent summers in Hunter, New York, at a farmhouse built in 1776 which Abraham purchased. Lefranc was often in poor health which made it difficult for her to attend school regularly.
Lefranc was the youngest child and at the age of six, she decided to become an artist. The Brooklyn home inspired her young artistic inclinations with colorful medallions and portraits of famous people on the library ceiling and a print of Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair on a wall. Eventually her mother, tired from housekeeping, talked Abe into moving into two suites at the Hotel Pennsylvania located in Manhattan. Margaret spent a lot of time alone when she wasn’t in the hands of a caregiver.
In New York City, Lefranc attended Adelphi Academy and Hunter College Model School. At the age of twelve and living at the Pennsylvania Hotel, she was chauffeured to her formal classes at the New York's Art Students League where she attended for three or four hours. She worked in charcoal drawing reproductions.
Abe's shipping business closed with the beginning of World War I, when one of his tankers was torpedoed by the Germans and the survivors were shot in their lifeboats. Abe was commissioned by the U. S. Government to scrap the German fleet, and the girl's parents moved to Germany but left the children in America. Celeste, the elder sister, who was nine years older and married, looked after Margaret. Lefranc finished the last few months in school, and at the age of thirteen, traveled by freighter to join her parents in Berlin where she contracted rheumatic fever. She spent almost a year in bed, didn’t speak German until six months later, and, at that time, wasn’t exposed to the widespread hardship in the city. Abe built her a small studio on the roof of their apartment building where Margaret drew in charcoals under the tutelage of a young art student who eventually told her parents to leave her alone and let her develop on her own. Once he brought an old woman he had met on the street to pose by Lefranc's bedside for a small amount of money. Lefranc was aware that the money from the sketch would allow the woman to buy some food. When Lefranc was well, she took classes in charcoal drawing and charcoal portraits at "Kunstschule des Westens", the School of the West. After a year in Berlin, the Frankel's moved to Paris.
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