De Ferranti Glossary: "Jean-Michel Frank"

Glossary: J

Jean-Michel Frank
an-Michel Frank (February 28, 1895-1941) was a french interior designer.
Jean-Michel Frank was born in Paris. From 1904, he attends the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris. In 1911, he begins law school. In 1915, he is cruelly hit by the double blow of the death of his two elder brothers, Oscar and Georges, on the Front line and that of his father who commits suicide. In 1919, he loses his mother who had been in an asylum for several years. From 1920 to 1925 he travels and visits the world. In Venice he meets the cosmopolitan society that gathered around Stravinsky and Diaghilev. Around 1927, Eugenia Errázuriz reveals to him the beauty of 18th Century styles and her own modern, minimalist esthetic, and he becomes her disciple.
He gets in contact with a Parisian decorator called Adolphe Chanaux to do his apartment in the Rue de Verneuil. In 1932, with Chanaux, he opens a shop at number 140 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. This will be the consecration of ten years of collaboration, when he decorated for the Rockefellers and Guerlain. During the winter of 1939-40, he leaves France for South America and the United States. In 1941, he commits suicide in New York.
He was a distant cousin of Anne Frank, the famous diarist, Frank is known for his works of marquetry with noble and luxury materials (vellum-sheathed walls, bleached leather, lacquer and shagreen).

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