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Seated Female is an assemblage of five parts that forms a nearly life-size human figure in which solids and voids interact and the image shifts as the viewpoint changes. Clay—the most ancient of materials, formed by human hand and baked in fire—is combined with one of the oldest subjects, the female form, to create a contemporary statement. Frank’s decision to form large sculptures from smaller parts not only emulated archaic Greek statues but was also an effective solution to the artist’s technical problem. As curator Hayden Herrera explains, “In the early 1970s, because she could not fit a life-size figure in her kiln, she began to assemble large clay figures out of a number of sections. When she laid the pieces out on the ground, sometimes the parts touched and sometimes they did not. Many people saw these figures as fragmented, but Mary saw the sections as part of a single flow of energy. The interstices between forms were alive for her. ‘I don’t think of them as voids,’ she comments. ‘The figures are often incomplete, but missing hands or feet do not seem amputated. Rather they merge with their surroundings.’” [2]
Mary Frank had been working with sculpture since the late 1950s, beginning with woodcarving and then with cast and carved plaster before she turned to clay. Her formal art instruction was in drawing, not sculpture, but she was inspired by the work of sculptors Henry Moore, Reuben Nakian, and Margaret Israel as well as the theatrical staging and puppetry of Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater. Through experimentation and repeated effort, Frank learned how to manipulate the clay to suit her purposes. “Deliberately she leaves spaces between and under the slabs so that structure is open and parts have room to breathe. In larger pieces clay slabs form an architectural armature over which the more organic sections of the figure are laid. ‘The armature gives certain thrusts to the piece,’ she explains. ‘The initial structure has the bones, I like to be able to see it, and I don’t know in advance how much of it will be covered up.’” [3]
Seated Female was formed out of clay extruded from a slab roller or rolled out by the artist and then was pinched, prodded, poked, scored, raked, torn, perforated, molded and imprinted. The sculpture’s surface reveals these various techniques and others, such as the darkened impression from ferns and leaves pressed into the wet clay that burned in the heat of the kiln and left scorched marks. “The artist frequently marks the surface of her sculpture with tattoo-like scratches of the impressions of leaves and ferns in particular, with single miniature reliefs. These are vestiges of memories of nature’s verdant ground or signatures from history of times past.” [4] Sometimes the clay was torn while still wet, or allowed to sag. Elsewhere the clay was allowed to dry and get leather-hard, leaving stress cracks on the surface when the clay was bent.
Frank, a former student of modern dance under Martha Graham, selected a pose that is informal but deliberate. The torso is quite recognizable as a female, with rounded breasts and partial labia. She has no arms. Her molded torso is supported by a flat, nearly rectangular piece with cutout slits that reference back ribs. She sits on the ground, upright left leg bent at the knee with the foot forward; the right leg rests on the ground, lower leg tucked underneath, with the foot pressed down. A partial indentation of a hand seems to grasp the right ankle. On the outer side of the upraised left leg, the artist dragged her fingers through the wet clay at a downward angle to the ground. As the viewer’s eye follows over and around the curve of the left thigh and knee, it cuts away to reveal an inner hollow where a precise line scored in the clay completes the contour of the leg. The woman’s rib cage is articulated, as if from straining, and accentuated by the dark tones created by the use of slip on the clay. Slip is a very watery substance of clay that is painted on the unfired clay and deepens to a rich, slightly bronzed brown in the heat of the kiln.
The figure’s head is tilted back, looking upwards with an indeterminate facial expression, as if, according to Herrera, in “a trance that equilibrates between anguish and rapture. Often the faces look vaguely Egyptian or African, or they bring to mind profiles from ancient art. Mary delights in their non-specificity; she sees them as coming from a time before human beings divided into races.” The suggestion of lowered lids and her slightly parted lips have prompted emotional readings of relaxation, ecstasy, fortitude under pressure, emotional and/or physical collapse. The left side of her face is sheared off and slip has been used to darken the resulting profile or silhouette created by the contours of the rounded half. Speaking of her faces, Frank allows, “in a state—maybe a state of grace, not necessarily in the Christian sense, but in a sense that is conveyed by the Yiddish saying: ‘Out of longing, and out of song, time was created. And, there is just enough time for one more day.’ I want to make that state of grace palpable.” [5]
It is possible to read Seated Female in the context of the artist’s biography. When Frank learned of the death of her twenty-year old daughter Andrea in a plane crash near the Mayan ruins of Tikal in Guatemala in late 1974, she wrote “I feel my sorrow well up like a hill, a smooth hill with no grass and deep sides. It stretches past my ribs to my hands and beyond, and inside the hill it cries.” Herrara recalls that Frank saw the connection with the leaf imprints, recalling the tropical jungle near Tikal, and death. “Using real ferns and leaves as stencils pressed against her large-scale women’s flesh, Mary brushed iron oxide powder around them. During the firing process, the iron oxide oxidized and turned rust color or dark brown—the color of ‘old blood.’ The imprinted leaves suggest the idea of the body replenishing the earth after death.” [6] The mythological references to Persephone, swallowed by the earth to be queen of the underworld, and Daphne, transformed into a tree to escape Apollo’s embrace, were now intermingled with Andrea’s tragic demise.
Notes:
[1] Linda Nochlin, Mary Frank: Encounters, exhibition catalogue (New York: Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2000), 24.
[2] Hayden Herrera, Natural Histories: Mary Frank’s Sculpture, Prints, and Drawing, exhibition catalogue (Lincoln, MA: deCordova and Dana Museum and Park, 1988), 11.
[3] Herrera, Natural Histories, 11.
[4] Stella Kramrisch, “Clay Sculptures by Mary Frank,” in Natural Histories, 24.
[5] Hayden Herrara, Mary Frank (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990), 78, and Frank quoted in Herrera, Natural Histories, 12.
[6] Herrera, Mary Frank, 63 and 66.
ProvenanceBarbara B. Millhouse, New York. [1]
Notes:
[1] Loan Agreement
Exhibition History2014-2015
Love & Loss
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (10/11/2014-12/13/2015)
Published ReferencesMary Frank. New York: DC Moore Gallery, 2013: Reynolda House mentioned in "Selected PUblic Collections" p. 33.
DepartmentCollection of Barbara B. Millhouse
Seated Female
Artist
Mary Frank
(born 1933)
Date1976
Mediumceramic in five parts, terracotta
DimensionsOther (part a - torso): 26 3/4 x 19 3/4 x 15 in. (67.9 x 50.2 x 38.1 cm)
Other (part b - proper left raised knee): 20 1/2 x 23 x 10 in. (52.1 x 58.4 x 25.4 cm)
Other (part c - proper right foot/hand): 7 1/2 x 16 1/2 x 14 1/2 in. (19.1 x 41.9 x 36.8 cm)
Other (part d - proper right thigh): 4 3/4 x 20 x 10 in. (12.1 x 50.8 x 25.4 cm)
Other (part e - proper left foot): 3 1/2 x 16 x 8 in. (8.9 x 40.6 x 20.3 cm)
Signed<unsigned>
Credit LineCourtesy of Barbara B. Millhouse
CopyrightCourtesy DC Moore Gallery
Object numberIL2003.1.12a-e
DescriptionMary Frank started using clay for sculpture in 1969 and by trial and error she learned how to manipulate the material to create sensitive images of women and nature. According to art historian Linda Nochlin, “Mary Frank reveals herself once more to be the visual poet of the inner life, evoking the pain and the mystery of our human embeddedness in the natural world. She is not afraid of large subjects, nor is she reluctant to deploy her extraordinary skills as a creator of memorable imagery in the service of our grandest, if at times darkest, experiences: love, death, chaos, loss, and fragmentation.” [1]Seated Female is an assemblage of five parts that forms a nearly life-size human figure in which solids and voids interact and the image shifts as the viewpoint changes. Clay—the most ancient of materials, formed by human hand and baked in fire—is combined with one of the oldest subjects, the female form, to create a contemporary statement. Frank’s decision to form large sculptures from smaller parts not only emulated archaic Greek statues but was also an effective solution to the artist’s technical problem. As curator Hayden Herrera explains, “In the early 1970s, because she could not fit a life-size figure in her kiln, she began to assemble large clay figures out of a number of sections. When she laid the pieces out on the ground, sometimes the parts touched and sometimes they did not. Many people saw these figures as fragmented, but Mary saw the sections as part of a single flow of energy. The interstices between forms were alive for her. ‘I don’t think of them as voids,’ she comments. ‘The figures are often incomplete, but missing hands or feet do not seem amputated. Rather they merge with their surroundings.’” [2]
Mary Frank had been working with sculpture since the late 1950s, beginning with woodcarving and then with cast and carved plaster before she turned to clay. Her formal art instruction was in drawing, not sculpture, but she was inspired by the work of sculptors Henry Moore, Reuben Nakian, and Margaret Israel as well as the theatrical staging and puppetry of Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater. Through experimentation and repeated effort, Frank learned how to manipulate the clay to suit her purposes. “Deliberately she leaves spaces between and under the slabs so that structure is open and parts have room to breathe. In larger pieces clay slabs form an architectural armature over which the more organic sections of the figure are laid. ‘The armature gives certain thrusts to the piece,’ she explains. ‘The initial structure has the bones, I like to be able to see it, and I don’t know in advance how much of it will be covered up.’” [3]
Seated Female was formed out of clay extruded from a slab roller or rolled out by the artist and then was pinched, prodded, poked, scored, raked, torn, perforated, molded and imprinted. The sculpture’s surface reveals these various techniques and others, such as the darkened impression from ferns and leaves pressed into the wet clay that burned in the heat of the kiln and left scorched marks. “The artist frequently marks the surface of her sculpture with tattoo-like scratches of the impressions of leaves and ferns in particular, with single miniature reliefs. These are vestiges of memories of nature’s verdant ground or signatures from history of times past.” [4] Sometimes the clay was torn while still wet, or allowed to sag. Elsewhere the clay was allowed to dry and get leather-hard, leaving stress cracks on the surface when the clay was bent.
Frank, a former student of modern dance under Martha Graham, selected a pose that is informal but deliberate. The torso is quite recognizable as a female, with rounded breasts and partial labia. She has no arms. Her molded torso is supported by a flat, nearly rectangular piece with cutout slits that reference back ribs. She sits on the ground, upright left leg bent at the knee with the foot forward; the right leg rests on the ground, lower leg tucked underneath, with the foot pressed down. A partial indentation of a hand seems to grasp the right ankle. On the outer side of the upraised left leg, the artist dragged her fingers through the wet clay at a downward angle to the ground. As the viewer’s eye follows over and around the curve of the left thigh and knee, it cuts away to reveal an inner hollow where a precise line scored in the clay completes the contour of the leg. The woman’s rib cage is articulated, as if from straining, and accentuated by the dark tones created by the use of slip on the clay. Slip is a very watery substance of clay that is painted on the unfired clay and deepens to a rich, slightly bronzed brown in the heat of the kiln.
The figure’s head is tilted back, looking upwards with an indeterminate facial expression, as if, according to Herrera, in “a trance that equilibrates between anguish and rapture. Often the faces look vaguely Egyptian or African, or they bring to mind profiles from ancient art. Mary delights in their non-specificity; she sees them as coming from a time before human beings divided into races.” The suggestion of lowered lids and her slightly parted lips have prompted emotional readings of relaxation, ecstasy, fortitude under pressure, emotional and/or physical collapse. The left side of her face is sheared off and slip has been used to darken the resulting profile or silhouette created by the contours of the rounded half. Speaking of her faces, Frank allows, “in a state—maybe a state of grace, not necessarily in the Christian sense, but in a sense that is conveyed by the Yiddish saying: ‘Out of longing, and out of song, time was created. And, there is just enough time for one more day.’ I want to make that state of grace palpable.” [5]
It is possible to read Seated Female in the context of the artist’s biography. When Frank learned of the death of her twenty-year old daughter Andrea in a plane crash near the Mayan ruins of Tikal in Guatemala in late 1974, she wrote “I feel my sorrow well up like a hill, a smooth hill with no grass and deep sides. It stretches past my ribs to my hands and beyond, and inside the hill it cries.” Herrara recalls that Frank saw the connection with the leaf imprints, recalling the tropical jungle near Tikal, and death. “Using real ferns and leaves as stencils pressed against her large-scale women’s flesh, Mary brushed iron oxide powder around them. During the firing process, the iron oxide oxidized and turned rust color or dark brown—the color of ‘old blood.’ The imprinted leaves suggest the idea of the body replenishing the earth after death.” [6] The mythological references to Persephone, swallowed by the earth to be queen of the underworld, and Daphne, transformed into a tree to escape Apollo’s embrace, were now intermingled with Andrea’s tragic demise.
Notes:
[1] Linda Nochlin, Mary Frank: Encounters, exhibition catalogue (New York: Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2000), 24.
[2] Hayden Herrera, Natural Histories: Mary Frank’s Sculpture, Prints, and Drawing, exhibition catalogue (Lincoln, MA: deCordova and Dana Museum and Park, 1988), 11.
[3] Herrera, Natural Histories, 11.
[4] Stella Kramrisch, “Clay Sculptures by Mary Frank,” in Natural Histories, 24.
[5] Hayden Herrara, Mary Frank (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990), 78, and Frank quoted in Herrera, Natural Histories, 12.
[6] Herrera, Mary Frank, 63 and 66.
ProvenanceBarbara B. Millhouse, New York. [1]
Notes:
[1] Loan Agreement
Exhibition History2014-2015
Love & Loss
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (10/11/2014-12/13/2015)
Published ReferencesMary Frank. New York: DC Moore Gallery, 2013: Reynolda House mentioned in "Selected PUblic Collections" p. 33.
Status
On viewCollections