Megan Marrin on
Jean-Michel Frank

Please join us for a talk by artist Megan Marrin on the mysterious life of interior designer Jean-Michel Frank. The talk is held on the occasion of Austerity, the artist’s solo exhibition at the Museum, which depicts Frank’s designs across several paintings.

Jean-Michel Frank is credited with signaling a break from the dense, saturated living spaces of the Victorian era, and instead embracing a “passion for absence” that became celebrated among the aesthetes of the interwar period in Europe and influenced subsequent generations of tastemakers and designers, including Jacques Grange and the late Jed Johnson, after his rediscovery in the 1970s.

Frank’s fixation with simplicity, perfection, and stripped-back elegance developed in tandem with a life defined by tragedy. Born in ill health and beset by family tragedy and the horrors of the Holocaust, Frank, who was Jewish and a cousin of Anne Frank, fled Paris for Buenos Aires in 1940, ending his life in New York City in 1941. Frank was prolific in his creative output, generating radical, opulent retreats, and frequently collaborating with artists from his social set, including Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Christian Bérard, and the Giacometti brothers. These environments were typified by unconventional materials, including mica, parchment, shagreen, glass, and gleaming metals.

Using archival imagery, anecdotes, and her own work, Marrin will explore the many cultural resurrections of Jean-Michel Frank and how his work has shaped contemporary understandings of refinement and taste.