Elsa Fraenkel 1892 - 1975
SCULPTOR ELSA Fraenkel’s work focused on the head, among her subjects were a rabbinical leader, the queen of Thailand, an Ethiopian princess, musicians, boxers and many more. Critics of her work praised her “extreme restrain” , saying of her head of Moses Gaster, head of the Sephardi community in the UK that “it is as if the intention is to let the character speak for itself.”
Elsa Fraenkel (née Rothschild) was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Bensheim, Germany in 1892. She studied drawing in Brussels, History of Art at Heidelberg University, and drawing and sculpture at Karlsruhe Academy, beginning to sculpt in 1914. Following marriage to lawyer Georg Fraenkel, she relocated to Hanover in 1918, becoming part of the circle centred on renowned Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. She specialised in portrait sculpture, and exhibited widely in Germany. From the mid-1920s she moved between Hanover and her Paris studio.In 1928 Schwitters dedicated a collage, incorporating the word PARIS, to ‘Frau Fränkel’ Influenced by Despiau’s portraits and ancient art in the Louvre, she worked with bronze, pewter and silver
Fraenkel divorced in 1934 and fled Nazi persecution to London the following year, with her son. She studied sculpture at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, initially supported by her parents, renting a flat in Notting Hill. In 1938, when her mother and daughter joined her, she moved to St John’s Wood.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Fraenkel escaped internment thanks to her son’s work on Mosquito bombers; her supporters included Leicester Galleries’ cofounder, Cecil Philips who wrote: “I have every reason to believe that she is highly honourable and respectable; and that she is loyal to the country of her adoption.” Although less prolific during the war — her income from Germany was lost, and her identity was briefly stolen by a German spy — Fraenkel’s bronze head of émigrée art historian Dr Stella Kramrisch was exhibited at the Royal Academy, in January 1940, and in May The Times praised her work.
During the Blitz, she relocated to Essex. In 1941 she exhibited two works in the Royal Academy Summer Show and showed her bust of Minna Tobler in Ben Uri’s re-opening exhibition in January 1944. Postwar, Fraenkel continued to exhibit earlier works and maintained links with Ben Uri, participating in the 1947 group show and exhibiting a bust of distinguished South East Asian art historian Sir Reginald Le May in the Anglo-Jewish Exhibition 1851–1951 Art Section, part of the 1951 Festival of Britain.
Naturalised in 1947, Fraenkel took an English surname at random from a telephone directory, becoming Elizabeth Dane in daily life
Around 1950, Fraenkel befriended former suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, who had close ties with Ethiopia. Fraenkel became a Council member for the Royal Society for India, Pakistan and Ceylon. In 1951 she sculpted a posthumous head of Ethiopian Princess Tsahai, Emperor Haile Selassie’s daughter.
Elected to the Royal Society of Arts in 1954, in 1961 her silver bronze bust of Queen Sirikit of Thailand was presented to the Royal Palace, Bangkok; she also sculpted a portrait of Pandit Nehru, first Indian Prime Minister. She died in Bangalore, India in 1975. “Please never listen to what artists say about others,” she wrote, “…I hear only what my eyes can tell me.”