Harold Frank Mixed Media Painting - "Green Geisha"

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May 25, 2023

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• Lot Description
  Harold Frank (American born in England, 1921-1995). "Green Geisha" mixed media on illustration board, n.d. Signed at lower right. A beautiful depiction of a Japanese geisha by Abstract Expressionist Harold Frank. The bust-length visage peers at the viewer from the right half of the composition, with a large window to the left. All is delineated in luscious shades of green with occasional purple highlights as well as decorative black on white curvilinear motifs adoring her coiffure and the background. In addition to this brilliant color palette, Frank's signature loose brushstrokes and lyrical contouring lines reveal his expressive "action painting" technique. Intriguingly, the process of painting was as much Frank's subject as the beautiful woman he portrayed. Size: 9.5" L x 10.625" W (24.1 cm x 27 cm)
  
  According to scholar Sandie Stern, "Although he never married, Frank searched for the perfect woman again and again in his endless, poignant portraits and paintings of the women. His abundance of female portraits attest to this. He was frustrated, yet unwavering. Art's human premise reflected his most intimate yearnings. Like his idol de Kooning, Frank chose the human figure, as his principal subject. Variations on women became a lifelong, consistent, ubiquitous theme." (Stern, "H. Frank", p. 16)
  
  Harold Frank immigrated with his family to the US through Ellis Island. Growing up in the tenements of the Lower East Side in New York City during the era of the Great Depression and World War II, Frank found Abstract Expressionism to be the ideal means to explore the angst of his world. He once stated, "I can live with the abstract. Life is a mystery."
  
  Frank studied at the Art Students League in New York, the National Academy of Design, the Pratt Institute, the Chouinard Art Institute, and UCLA where he was a colleague of Richard Diebenkorn (American, 1922-1993), an artist who is oftentimes associated with Abstract Expressionism as well as a pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. In addition to Diebenkorn, Frank's influences include DeKooning, Picasso, Matisse, and Rouault. While he also created landscapes, non-objective abstract compositions, and still-life paintings, figures and head studies were the predominant theme of his oeuvre.
  
  For more about Harold Frank, see Sandie Stern's monograph "Harold Frank Abstract Expressionist 1921-1995" (2001).
  
  Provenance: private Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA collection, acquired via descent, purchased from artist on June 25th, 1973
  
  All items legal to buy/sell under U.S. Statute covering cultural patrimony Code 2600, CHAPTER 14, and are guaranteed to be as described or your money back.
  
  A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids.
  
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  #175902

  Condition

  Signed at lower right. Very nice with vivid imagery and strong coloration. Verso shows paint splatters, remnants of tape around the peripheries, and collection labels.
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