Artist info
MICHAEL FRARY
American, 1918 - 2005
(Texas, California)
Born:
Santa Monica, California
Education:
Awards:
American, 1918 - 2005
(Texas, California)
Born:
Santa Monica, California
Education:
- West Palm Beach High School, Florida - Graduated 1935.
- University of Southern California (Scholarship 1934 - 1941).
- Bachelor of Architecture Degree, 1940.
- Master of Fine Arts Degree in Painting, 1941.
- Chicago Art Institute, Painting Fellowship, Summer 1941.
- Escuela de Bellas Artes, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, Summer 1949.
- Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, Paris, 1949 - 1950.
- Art Study Tour of Europe, May - June 1971.
Awards:
- 2007 Recipient, William E. Doty Award
- 2009 Recipient, Texas Biennial Tribute Artist
Collections & Exhibits
Selected Collections:
Solo Exhibitions:
Frary participated in over 200 one-man exhibitions during his career, including at the following institutions:
- Bocour Collection, New York, New York
- Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
- Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, Texas
- Grumbacher Collection, New York, New York
- Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles, California
- Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
- National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC
- Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.
- Virginia Museum of Art, Richmond, Virginia
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York
- Witte Memorial Museum, San Antonio, Texas
Solo Exhibitions:
Frary participated in over 200 one-man exhibitions during his career, including at the following institutions:
- The Witte Museum, San Antonio, Texas
- The McNay Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas
- The Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, Missouri
- Colorado Springs Fine Arts Museum
- Peabody Museum, Salem, Massachusetts
- Institute of Texan Cultures, San Antonio, Texas
- Amarillo Art Center, Amarillo, Texas
- Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas, Austin, Texas
- Performing Arts Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas
- Dalzell Hatfield Gallery, Los Angeles, Texas
- Janet Nessler, New York, New York
- Santa Fe East, Santa Fe, New Mexico
- Meredith Long, Houston, Texas
- Valley House, Dallas, Texas
- The Gallery, Palm Springs, California
artist bio
Michael Frary was a nationally significant American Modernist. Frary's roots in architecture are evident in many of his works. Frary’s education made him singularly alive to the creative potential in shapes, lines and surface textures. He saw beauty in precision and structure and was able to invest his subjects – often buildings or other human constructs - with a kind of solidity that suggested timelessness and significance.
But human constructs and artifice were not the only subjects that intrigued Frary. He was a gifted watercolorist, often presenting Texas’ dense woods and thickets with an unaffected poetical sensibility. And when working in oils, Frary could create works of pure imagination: works that either minimized humanity’s significance or denied it altogether. Frary’s paintings could, on occasion, assume a magical, numinous look - quite a feat given the artist’s nearly Constructivist proclivities. His paintings of coves and grottos, with their placid, still waters and their rock formations suggestive of stalagmites or accumulations of coral, are reminiscent of works by Ernst.
Frary’s talents and his versatility earned him admirers, as well as students. He won more than 175 awards and purchase prizes over the span of his long career and saw his works housed in a number of prominent national institutions and collections, including:
Michael Frary was born in Santa Monica, California in 1918. He attended architecture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He became a convert to painting, however, and remained at UCLA to earn his Master’s in Fine Art in painting. He then attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris.
Frary, after rounding out his art instruction, saw his ambitions temporarily derailed. He served in the Navy in World War II and, after the war, became an assistant art director for Goldwyn Studios, Paramount, and Universal. This capitulation to practicality was short-lived. He began teaching, starting first at his old alma mater, the University of Southern California, before graduating to Los Angeles City College, and the Chouinard School of Art, a hothouse for West Coast artists. Frary remained in his native Southern California until 1949.
When he was 31, Frary moved to Texas, accepting a position as artist-in-residence and faculty chairman for the San Antonio Art Institute. After just a few years in San Antonio, he migrated northward and, in 1952, accepted a position as an assistant professor with the University of Texas, Austin. He was named a Professor of Art in 1970 and, when he retired in 1986, was honored with the title of Professor Emeritus of Art.
Ken Hale, an artist and professor at UT, said this of Frary’s accomplishments as an educator: "Michael Frary was an inspirational teacher. His classes were always full... Frary and his peers were the catalyst that gave the studio art program at UT a national and international level of recognition beginning in the 1950s. He was an artist and a teacher of the first class."
Frary’s fame and legacy, in large part, comes from the time he spent in Austin. There, he came into contact with the Texas modernists: Charles Umlauf, Everett Spruce, Ralph White, Kelly Fearing, William Lester, and Loren Mozley. Frary’s approach to art made him temperamentally suitable for the Texas modernist school. He had assimilated a number of European exports - his works contained hints of everything from Futurism to Surrealism – and was adept at synthesizing them into an updated, renovated approach to figurative painting.
Frary painted for nearly 70 years, dying in 2005. His immense oeuvre, containing everything from astute portraits to totemic, monumental abstractions, offered an abundance of perspectives on nature, humanity and the interactions between the two. In his watercolors and a select few oils, Frary implicitly asserted that nature has an unassailable and fundamentally immutable quality. Rivers, woods, and caves became powerful when Frary painted them. And yet, in his abstractions, Frary valorized human constructs, conflating oil derricks with ziggurats and making rotting wharfs into wonders of engineering and artifice. This multidimensional approach to art made Frary challenging and resistant to classification, but it also made him a particularly intriguing figure in the larger Modernist movement.
But human constructs and artifice were not the only subjects that intrigued Frary. He was a gifted watercolorist, often presenting Texas’ dense woods and thickets with an unaffected poetical sensibility. And when working in oils, Frary could create works of pure imagination: works that either minimized humanity’s significance or denied it altogether. Frary’s paintings could, on occasion, assume a magical, numinous look - quite a feat given the artist’s nearly Constructivist proclivities. His paintings of coves and grottos, with their placid, still waters and their rock formations suggestive of stalagmites or accumulations of coral, are reminiscent of works by Ernst.
Frary’s talents and his versatility earned him admirers, as well as students. He won more than 175 awards and purchase prizes over the span of his long career and saw his works housed in a number of prominent national institutions and collections, including:
- The National Museum of American Art
- The Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.
- The Los Angeles County Museum
- The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
- The Virginia Museum of Art, Richmond, Virginia
- The Dallas Museum of Fine Arts
- The Witte Memorial Museum
- The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
- The Janet Nessler Gallery, New York, New York
- The Knoedler Gallery, New York, New York
- The Grumbacher Collection, New York, New York
- The Bocour Collection, New York, New York
Michael Frary was born in Santa Monica, California in 1918. He attended architecture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He became a convert to painting, however, and remained at UCLA to earn his Master’s in Fine Art in painting. He then attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris.
Frary, after rounding out his art instruction, saw his ambitions temporarily derailed. He served in the Navy in World War II and, after the war, became an assistant art director for Goldwyn Studios, Paramount, and Universal. This capitulation to practicality was short-lived. He began teaching, starting first at his old alma mater, the University of Southern California, before graduating to Los Angeles City College, and the Chouinard School of Art, a hothouse for West Coast artists. Frary remained in his native Southern California until 1949.
When he was 31, Frary moved to Texas, accepting a position as artist-in-residence and faculty chairman for the San Antonio Art Institute. After just a few years in San Antonio, he migrated northward and, in 1952, accepted a position as an assistant professor with the University of Texas, Austin. He was named a Professor of Art in 1970 and, when he retired in 1986, was honored with the title of Professor Emeritus of Art.
Ken Hale, an artist and professor at UT, said this of Frary’s accomplishments as an educator: "Michael Frary was an inspirational teacher. His classes were always full... Frary and his peers were the catalyst that gave the studio art program at UT a national and international level of recognition beginning in the 1950s. He was an artist and a teacher of the first class."
Frary’s fame and legacy, in large part, comes from the time he spent in Austin. There, he came into contact with the Texas modernists: Charles Umlauf, Everett Spruce, Ralph White, Kelly Fearing, William Lester, and Loren Mozley. Frary’s approach to art made him temperamentally suitable for the Texas modernist school. He had assimilated a number of European exports - his works contained hints of everything from Futurism to Surrealism – and was adept at synthesizing them into an updated, renovated approach to figurative painting.
Frary painted for nearly 70 years, dying in 2005. His immense oeuvre, containing everything from astute portraits to totemic, monumental abstractions, offered an abundance of perspectives on nature, humanity and the interactions between the two. In his watercolors and a select few oils, Frary implicitly asserted that nature has an unassailable and fundamentally immutable quality. Rivers, woods, and caves became powerful when Frary painted them. And yet, in his abstractions, Frary valorized human constructs, conflating oil derricks with ziggurats and making rotting wharfs into wonders of engineering and artifice. This multidimensional approach to art made Frary challenging and resistant to classification, but it also made him a particularly intriguing figure in the larger Modernist movement.
