Australian Dictionary of Biography

Margaret Frankel at the wheel

Risingholme archives

Elaine Margaret Frankel (1902–1997), painter and potter, was born on 8 October 1902 at Christchurch, New Zealand, eldest of three surviving children of Mary Phoebe Anderson, née Murphy, formerly Williams, and her husband Frederick William Anderson, engineer, both New Zealand born. Frederick’s father John had founded one of the region’s largest engineering firms, based in nearby Lyttelton. Margaret attended the Presbyterian Rangi Ruru Girls’ School (1913–21), followed in 1923 by a year-long art study trip to Paris. On her return she studied at Canterbury College School of Art (1925–26), and later gained (1932) a diploma of fine arts from the University of New Zealand.

In 1927 Anderson had been a founding member of ‘The Group,’ a mainly female collective of Canterbury College art graduates—including (Dame) Ngaio Marsh and Evelyn Page—who curated their own work for exhibition at their studio, setting a precedent for modernist artistic independence in New Zealand. Anderson exhibited regionalist landscapes and pottery with the Group until 1958, and, although there were no elected officers and the organisation was loosely structured, she acted as treasurer from about 1936. She also tutored in painting and crafts at several Christchurch schools from 1929, including Rangi Ruru, and from 1939 taught hand-built pottery at Avonside Girls’ High School.

After an eight-year affair, on 8 December 1939 Anderson married the divorced plant geneticist Otto Herzberg Frankel at the registrar’s office, Christchurch. Together they helped found Risingholme Community Centre at Margaret’s old Opawa family home, where she tutored in pottery after it opened in 1944. In 1946 she was elected a committee member of the Canterbury Society of Arts, but resigned in protest in 1948 after the society refused to purchase Frances Hodgkins’s modernist painting, Pleasure Garden, for the city’s Robert McDougall Art Gallery. Following a four-year campaign, the painting was finally gifted and accepted in 1951.

Having moved to Canberra in 1951, where Otto had been appointed chief of the division of plant industry at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Margaret focused on pottery, initially using the CSIRO scientist Herbie Angell’s wheel and kiln. At the Canberra Technical College, she found a flourishing pottery department and enrolled as an advanced student. From June to October 1954 she was a relief teacher at the college. She set up her own studio and kiln in the Oscar Bayne-designed home she and Otto built in Turner in 1953. Her earthenware domestic vessels included jugs, cups, vases, and beakers made from clay and glaze materials found around Canberra. In early 1963 she built a stoneware kiln thereby adding higher temperature pottery to her repertoire.

As honorary secretary of the Canberra Art Club, Frankel was one of only five women amongst eighty-three witnesses to appear before the Senate Select Committee on the Development of Canberra (1954–55), chaired by John McCallum. She urged the establishment of better cultural facilities and a national art institution in the capital. In her later role as club president (1955–58), her efforts to broaden community involvement in the arts included classes for children, and the popular crafts of silk screen printing and mosaic making; she also tutored classes in hand-built pottery. Re-elected president in 1962, she helped to organise a national exhibition of invited contemporary ceramic artists in May 1962. As inaugural president of the Australian Capital Territory Council of Cultural Societies, in 1963 she was a leading force behind the Griffin Centre, which after 1965 provided a central venue for ACT cultural organisations. Otto was knighted in 1966. In 1969 the Frankels worked closely with the architect Roy Grounds and the builder Theo Bischoff to design their new home at Campbell, including a studio and kiln.  That year she was a jury member for the 1969 C. S. Daley medal architectural award.

 Lady Frankel was an inaugural member of the all-women Bimbimbi Ceramic Study Group set up in 1974 by the Japanese ceramicist Hiroe Swen. She exhibited at their first showing in 1977; the venue for this and subsequent annual exhibitions was the Frankels’ garden. By the 1980s her pottery had become more sculptural in form, and she also strove for innovative shapes, methods, and textures, for example by dropping the clay on to pebbly surfaces before firing.

Cosmopolitan, gracious, and a ‘moving spirit’ (Press 1951, 3), Frankel possessed the diplomacy and organisational skills that enabled her to bring contemporary art to wider audiences in Canberra. Her friend Margaret Evans described her as a ‘paragon of virtues,’ with an ‘endearing quality of warmth, interest and personal concern’ (1982, 2). Frankel died on 9 December 1997 in Canberra and was cremated; Otto died the next year. Her work is represented in the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery, at Rangi Ruru Girls’ School, and in private collections in New Zealand and Australia. The Frankel estate bequeathed funds from the sale of their home to the National Gallery of Australia to purchase significant New Zealand art works, including Colin McCahon’s Crucifixion: The Apple Branch (2004) and a self-portrait by Rita Angus (2010). They also donated to the NGA ceramics by Shoji Hamada, Bernard Leach, and Lucie Rie.