I knew Mary Frank only as a figure in a photograph. She was the beautiful, exhausted young mother in the car with her two children at the end of Robert Frank’s The Americans—the woman keeping their kids fed, clean, and happy on the road, while her husband completed work that would make him immortal in the history of photography.
In 2010 I met her through her cousin Paul Weinstein, who I’d met through David Levy, the former director of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. Paul was a businessman and a jazz presenter, Levy told me, and he might be able to help my research in some way. One night, Paul and I were having dinner downtown, and I told him I’d spent the afternoon with the photographer Robert Frank in his Bleecker Street studio, talking about Gene Smith. Paul said nonchalantly, My cousin Mary used to be married to Robert. I startled to attention, the small town of New York City revealing itself to me once again.
Mary and Paul’s grandfather, Gregory Weinstein, had emigrated from Russia in the 1870s and started a printing business on Varick Street, a business Paul still runs today. After being introduced by Paul I visited Mary at her sixth-floor studio on the north side of West Nineteenth in November 2010.
Frank’s home contained art, objects, and all kinds of materials. The afternoon sun poured through the eight-foot windows—warm, early winter light. Her husband, the musicologist Leo Treitler, remained in his office after a brief, friendly introduction, and an assistant worked quietly on a computer. Squash roasted in the kitchen, and the aroma filled the apartment. It felt like a country house. On the kitchen counter, a Post-it note jotted with blue ink read: “Leo, today sometime, please squeeze in playing me a mazurka or whatever else you think is beautiful.” When the squash was ready, she offered me a piece.
Mary Frank was born Mary Lockspeiser in London in 1933. Her mother was a painter and her father a musicologist. She and her mother emigrated to New York in 1940 to escape the war. She began doing artwork in her mother’s shadow, and in the late ’40s, she studied dance with Martha Graham. At age seventeen, she married Robert Frank and the next year gave birth to their son, Pablo. Their daughter, Andrea, was born three years later. In the mid-’50s, Mary studied drawing with Hans Hofmann, then became an influential sculptor, then a painter. She and Robert divorced in 1969. Neither child, Pablo nor Andrea, made it to middle age. Andrea died in an airplane crash in 1974, and Pablo, who had Hodgkin’s, committed suicide in 1994.
Paul had introduced me to Mary as a biographer of Gene Smith. She had memories of Smith, so my first visit was ostensibly to hear them. She told me that Smith often wrote letters to her and Robert from Africa when he was there working on his Albert Schweitzer essay for Life in 1954. She used a word to describe Smith that I hadn’t ever heard in all my years working on this project: touching.
You could feel that everything was a struggle for him. It was touching to witness that effort and struggle.
Mary was generous, playful, and tender at the same time she was understated and exacting. I grew curious about her work, and she showed me her new photographs, which beg for autobiographical elaboration that she quietly dismisses, saying only, with a laugh, It’s much better if viewers of art are asked to work hard. She told me that having a printer like Paul in the family had made her a better artist—he gave her paper to work on. Paul’s generosity allowed me to draw so freely, without worrying about mistakes. It affected my drawing in a wonderful way.
As I was packing up to leave, Mary’s little dog emerged. Do you want to see a trick? she asked. She pulled out a hula-hoop with paper flames taped to it. She held it low and the dog leapt through, delighted, and then back through it from the other side.
When I returned home to North Carolina, I called the photographer, filmmaker, and musician John Cohen, who was making a documentary film about Mary. He has known her since the ’50s.
There’s something about her, and the only word I can think of is magic, Cohen told me. It’s more than beauty, although there is that. Photographers like Walker Evans, Elliott Erwitt, Ralph Gibson, myself, and others were drawn to photograph her. When she was with Robert, she was equally as fascinating as him, if not more so. That magical, mysterious quality is in her work, too. Her art isn’t conceptual; it’s not geared for the market. It comes from a deep, subconscious place. There are characters and figures in her work that are still around from fifty years ago, but she’s never stuck. The characters mature and evolve. It’s a visual language she created on her own. There’s feminism and nature and ancient mythology, but to say those words limits what her work really is. There is a tremendous sense of personal biography, and there’s tragedy, but it’s not spelled out. It’s left to the viewer to bring their own biography to it.
I called Mary to ask her what kind of work she would do next.
I really love drawing from life and I haven’t done that in a while, she answered. I’d like to continue with the series of photographs, working with fire, water, and ice. I also have some unfinished paintings, some recent ones and some from many years ago. I’d like to finish the old ones in ways I couldn’t have done when I started them. But all of this is conjecture—because, who knows? Decisions are like butterflies. I study butterflies at our country home. Their tongues are like watch springs; they are coils. Butterflies go from one flower to the next flower looking for nectar, extending their coils, testing every flower. I’m looking for nectar, too.