Paul Frankl

Paul Frankl (22 April 1878 – 30 January 1962) was an art historian born in Austria-Hungary. Frankl is most known for his writings on the history and principles of architecture, which he famously presented within a Gestalt-oriented framework.

Paul Frankl was born in Prague into the prominent rabbinic Spira-Frankl family. From 1888 to 1896, he attended a German Gymnasium, after which he enrolled in the German Staats-Obergymnasium of Prague, graduating in 1896. He served for one year as Lieutenant in the Austrian military. In order to pursue a degree in higher education, he converted to Catholicism, a move that was not uncommon among non-Catholics during this era. He matriculated to the Technische Hochschule in Munich and, later, Berlin, and graduated with a degree in architecture in 1904.

While in Berlin, Frankl fostered social relationships within circles of philosophers and artists whose members included fellow Pragueian Max Wertheimer, who knew Käthe Kollwitz. These artists and philosophers not only introduced Frankl to new systems of thinking, such as Gestalt psychology, but also to his future wife, the artist and musician, Elsa Herzberg, who shared a studio with Käthe Kollwitz. Frankl and Herzberg eventually had five children.

In 1908, Frankl left his work as an architect to study philosophy, history, and art history at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich under Heinrich Wölfflin and Berthold Riehl, the founder of the Institut für Kunstgeschichte. Riehl supervised Frankl's doctoral dissertation on fifteenth-century glass painting in southern Germany.

After the completion of his dissertation in 1910, Frankl worked as Wölfflin's assistant and wrote his Habilitationsschrift, which offered a systematic definition of the formal principles of architecture from the Renaissance onwards. Frankl was heavily influenced by Wölfflin's understanding of architectural development, but did not adhere to Wölfflin's views on formalism. From 1914 to 1920, Frankl held a position as privatdozent, which enabled him to teach at the University of Munich while contributing to the Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft (ed. Albert Brinckmann and Fritz Burger). In 1914, Frankl wrote his first theoretical work, Die Entwicklungsphasen der neueren Baukunst (1914). Die Entwicklungsphasen proposes four major categories of art history analysis - spatial composition, treatment of mass and surface, treatment of optical effects, and the relation of design to social function - that Frankl continued to draw upon in his later work.

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