Hans Frank revisited

One way or another I always find Hans Frank hard to avoid and here I am again looking at his early prints. Frank had a long and varied career which began while still a student at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna where he gained a reputation for colour woodcuts of remarkable skill and maturity. He was also fortunate to be studying at the school in the heyday of the Vienna Secession and was able to produce prints like Silver pheasant (above) as eloquent and impressive as any print made during those seminal few years.

This is a big claim and I make it because if Frank is the art equivalent of a conviction politician. What he did in those years was never half-hearted. Even when he represented young animals like fauns, they come vivid and fully rounded. At the same stage in his own career, Allen Seaby was struggling to get it right. Why? Because the British allowed technique to get in the way while the Austrians placed the emphasis on design. It was not about animals, it was not about birds, it was not about snow, it was about the ability of the artist to put a memorable image on the page.

By about 1908, Seaby was doing his best work but try and imagine him then making an etching as good as as Frank's Eagle (above) made by Frank in 1909 about the time Frank moved to the School of Fine Art. Ironically, the Austrians were interested in British printmakers but did not see the ones who were making artists' prints. Frank Brangwyn had three rooms dedicated to his etchings at the Vienna Secession exhibition of 1909 but he did not print his own work. William Nicholson's woodcuts were also widely admired in Austrian and Germany. Like Brangwyn he was invited to exhibit with the Secession (in his case in 1899) and although his portrait H.M. The Queen was responsible for all the  square images subsequently made in Vienna from then on, what the Austrians actually saw were wood-engravings made to look like woodcuts. Nicholson only once applied inks by hand and always used printer's ink (and probably did not print the work himself either). As with the Austrians, this all placed the emphasis on the image rather than the impression.

Frank did not always used a key-block but used pattern to build up the image instead. This made feathers useful and helps explain why exotic birds like peacocks and silver pheasants became subjects. Something similar can be said for butterflies or plants like clover. The butterfly above has a black pattern which means there is no need for an overall key-block while the petals of clover are pink and cream. With snow, there is no detail at all. This is not to say he was making it easy for himself only that he did not necessarily want to create a naturalistic effect.

It was all carefully considered and it would be a mistake to downplay or miss his achievement as I heard one distinguished British wood-engraver do when shown one of Frank's fauns. He called it 'sweet' and that was all. I wonder how he would have described Frank's woodcut of an eagle (above) if I had found that at Oxford Antiques Centre instead of the faun. I suppose Richard Shirley Smith wasn't very interested even though both the School of Applied Arts and then the School of Fine Art in Vienna were training artists like Frank during a time of great innovation for C20th design.

Prints made by Frank before the first war remain affordable. (What set me off was seeing a peacock of his up for sale on U.S. ebay. I have probably said this before but what you get with early Frank is a small piece of great period of modern design.  What you also get is the work of artist with considerable powers of observation as you will see from the detail (above) and of objectivity (below).  He is not as obviously Japanese in manner as, say, his contemporary Carl Thiemann, but when it comes to a stylish but objective interest in the world, he is far more Japanese than Thiemann. It all depends what you mean by Japanese!