Eva Frankfurther, Artist
There is an unmistakeable melancholic beauty which characterises Eva Frankfurther‘s East End drawings made during her brief working career in the nineteen-fifties. Born into a cultured Jewish family in Berlin in 1930, she escaped to London with her parents in 1939 and studied at St Martin’s School of Art between 1946 and 1952, where she was a contemporary of Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach.
Yet Eva turned her back on the art school scene and moved to Whitechapel, taking menial jobs at Lyons Corner House and then at a sugar refinery, immersing herself in the community she found there. Taking inspiration from Rembrandt, Käthe Kollwitz and Picasso, Eva set out to portray the lives of working people with compassion and dignity.
In 1959, afflicted with depression, Eva took her own life aged just twenty-eight, but despite the brevity of her career she revealed a significant talent and a perceptive eye for the soulful quality of her fellow East Enders.
“West Indian, Irish, Cypriot and Pakistani immigrants, English whom the Welfare State had passed by, these were the people amongst whom I lived and made some of my best friends. My colleagues and teachers were painters concerned with form and colour, while to me these were only means to an end, the understanding of and commenting on people.” – Eva Frankfurther
Images copyrigh t© Estate of Eva Frankfurter
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These are the kind that make it look so easy, but I know it’s not. She draws a few wobbly lines, and I bet I would know that man if I saw him on the Tube. I scratch a dozen lines just to make one side of the nose, and my faces look like cartoons. Bad ones. She was a great artist.
She’s so beautiful, so sad.
So sad. I am anxious to learn more of the life of Eva Frankfurter. There is no reference to her work in East End Vernacular. Any clues to the whereabouts of the Estate of Eva Frankfurter would be very welcome. Thanks so much.
Melvyn Brooks Karkur Israel.
Eva’s art is striking and on the dark side, a mental condition can sometimes heighten perception.
In that period of our history there was a tremendous upheaval which reflected on people. She would have survived today with all the help that’s around. G Bless Eva Shalom Aleichem. John a poet from Bristol
The picture of the mother and child made me shiver and others so full of character. So sad when mental health robs us of such talent.
Greetings from Boston,
GA, Eva’s sketches are profoundly moving. None of her subjects is actually smiling, as if she can channel the tragedy that unfolded in Europe during her brief lifetime. The one of the mother and two young children is particularly poignant.
A great Artist with a very tragical Life Story …
Love & Peace
ACHIM
Many thanks. Some artists are easy to find and analyse especially
Barnett Freedman, Morris Goldstein and Leon Kossoff. But Eva
Frankfurther enjoyed such a short career that my courses on British
artists have never included her. So I will have to do a lot of
reading before we start up again, later this year
Such emotive images, perhaps reflecting personal anguish suffered by Eva. Sad to hear that she died so young.
Eva was so talented, so empathetic and perceptive that her portraits touch the soul. What a dreadful shame that she did not survive to enjoy the respect and the fame her work would surely have brought her. I hope her drawings now hang in London’s great museums, as they deserve to be.