Frank Szasz
Frank was a young man who was identified as Jewish at the time of World War II. More than once, he owed his life to his art. He worked for the underground, making documents during WWII.
Then, as a 19-year-old art student celebrating the end of the war, he was conscripted off the streets by occupying Soviet troops and transported to a forced labor camp in the Soviet Union.
In survival mode Frank would bargain with guards for food and cigarettes in exchange for a portrait drawing. He soon discovered they wouldn't honor the trade of a portrait, so he began leaving an ear undone until he was compensated.
Another story Frank told was of eluding forced labor by prolonging the painting of a giant portrait of Stalin by using motor oil as the binder, which never dried.
Frank came as a refuge to the United States in 1957 during the Hungarian Revolution. Joyce Hall brought him from New York to Kansas City to join the art staff at Hallmark Cards. He also taught painting at the Kansas City Art Institute and Rockhurst College.
Frank's Albert Einstein portrait was our first Global PathMarker. Fred Culver saw the painting on the easel in the studio Fred rented to Frank and wished aloud, "There must be something they could do" with the image. The painting wasn't for sale as Frank was working on a commission. However, he explained that he always retained publishing rights. Fred and Frank struck a gentleman's deal, a handshake, to forgive back studio rent for the right to publish the Einstein portrait.
We are also pleased to offer Szasz's portrait of Carl Gustav Jung, published by CCHD Jung Project, KCMO. Mary Dian Molton arranged for the portrait.
Ernst Ulmer painted the Maria Montessori portrait after Frank's death in Frank's style.
All Global PathMarkers images are copyrighted, and all rights are reserved.
NIXON PAINTING
Home for GOP white elephant
KANSAS CITY, MO. ((UPI) -
The Republican Party’s white elephant has a buyer.
Frank Szasz’s commissioned portrait of former President Richard Nixon was to have been hung with pomp and circumstance in 1974 at the Republican national headquarters in Washington.
GOP leaders got a preview of the portrait in Washington in March 1973 and were pleased. But after the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, the painting found only a home in a GOP closet.
Outraged Szasz dispatched the portrait back to Kansas City.
“I demanded it back,” said an angry Szasz. “I never got paid for it.”
The painting, depicting a solemn Nixon against a backdrop of two American flags, was commissioned by the GOP at a cost of $5,000. Further plans had called for it to be displayed to the public during the nation’s Bicentennial Celebration in 1976.
But the portrait quickly became a white elephant on the art market. Well known art auction house rejected a proposal to sell it and correspondence to the Nixon family in San Clemente, Calif., to purchase the work went unanswered.
“I didn’t push it,” said Szasz. “I put the portrait in my attic in the crate and that was that.”
That is until a Tennessee physician and his wife took a liking to the portrait and announced plans to purchase it. Szasz said the paint will have a Tennessee home next week.
Szasz said he was no longer bitter that the Republicans dunned the portrait, only disappointed that its fate was determined by the nation’s foremost political scandal.
“It was probably the mood of the nation that people didn’t want to dwell on the issue of Nixon at that time,” said Szasz. “There was a great deal of hostility among Republicans toward the president (Nixon).
“So they let it out on the portrait.”
Nixon was not Szasz’s first portrait of a president. He has painted Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Gerald Ford, and Dwight Eisenhower and Mexican president Jose Lopez Portillo. But the Hungarian immigrant had considered the job as an honor.
“It was one of the greatest commission I had,” said Szasz. “He (Nixon) was at the height of the presidency. I was thrilled, of course.”
Szasz now has been commissioned to paint King Hussein of Jordan. He will travel to the Middle East next month.
Nixon was not the only member of his administration having trouble with his portrait.
Former vice president Spiro Agnew, who had his own political trouble before Watergate, had his portrait done as Maryland governor, but it remains in storage and no one has asked for it to be hung in any state office.
Agnew, 62, who resigned as governor to become Nixon’s vice president, in 1968, pleaded no contest in 1973 to a federal charge of failing to report $129,500 in income in 1967 while governor of Maryland.
PUBLISHED: July 22, 1988 at 1:00 AM CDT | UPDATED: August 8, 2021 at 8:48 PM CDT
**Somewhere in these statistics was Wednesday’s sparsely attended unveiling of an official life-size portrait of former FBI director William Webster, which was hung in the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building even though Webster last year switched jobs to take over the directorship of the CIA. The painting, by artist Frank Szasz and technically on loan from the St. Louis Bar Association that commissioned it, joins portraits of former FBI directors J. Edgar Hoover and Clarence Kelley.
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/movingimage-records/vt2006-22-vt2006-22
Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Queen Noir of Jordan
https://www.mutualart.com/Artist/Frank-Szasz/759D0AC664388DB2/Artworks Truman