Frank Weitzel

Café (Paris Café)
coloured linocut
signed and numbered in pencil 3/50 lower left; inscribed in pencil below image lower right

SOLD

Provenance:

Provenance: Ward Gallery, Sydney, c1980; private collection, Sydney.

Exhibitions:

3rd Exhibition of British Lino Cuts, Redfern Gallery (?) 1931, no. 65, 1gn; 'Exhibition of the Latest Work of Frank Weitzel', Modern Art Centre, Sydney, 1933, no. 38, 1 1/2 gns (as Paris Cafe); 'A Survey of Australian Relief Prints, 1900-1950' Deutscher Fine Art, 1978, 13 April - 5 May 1978, cat., no. 190 (illustrated in catalogue). 

Literature:

‘A Sullen Silence - Frank Weitzel, Modernist (1905-1932)’ by Gail Ross, Art New Zealand, Issue 116, 2005.

Some notes on Frank Weitzel by Stephen Scheding 

In 1977 I spent the year doing ‘the grand tour’ which young Australians typically did in their VW Kombis, purchased for the purpose outside Australia House in London. While ‘touring’ the private London galleries I came across Michael Parkin at his gallery in Motcomb Street. He was specialising in prints and, in particular, in prints from the Claude Flight School. I was really ‘just looking’, but I did know that Australian artists such as Dorrit Black and Ethel Spowers had studied under Claude Flight.   In browsing through one of Michael Parkin’s old catalogues I came across a reference to two linocuts by ‘Frank Weitzel’. I did not know Weitzel’s work, but I remembered his name from the catalogue of a furniture exhibition held at Burdekin House in Sydney in 1929. In the small Modern section of the Burdekin House exhibition a ‘man’s study’ had been ‘arranged by Weitzel and Henry Pynor’, with Weitzel doing ‘wall decorations’ and furniture designs ‘similar to those which are carried out at the Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany’. For someone like me, information like that is hard to forget, especially as the other artists contributing to this Modernist section of this exhibition had been Roy de Maistre, Adrien Feint, Thea Proctor and Hera Roberts. I also remembered the information that Weitzel had had a studio over Grubb’s butcher shop at Circular Quay where he made wall hangings, batik shawls, lamp shades, book ends and sculpture, as well as linocuts. And he played violin in the Conservatorium Orchestra. This may explain his outfit in a portrait of him painted by Dore Hawthorne which I later found. 

I discovered that the Parkin Gallery still owned the two Weitzel linocuts, but they had been sent to an exhibition at a gallery in Milan, Compagnia del Disegno. Michael Parkin didn’t have photographs of them, but he told me the Italians would love these linocuts, since they were abstract and they ‘related to Italian Futurism’. That was enough for me. Anything abstract by anyone who had worked in Sydney in the 1920s was worth having.  I bought them sight unseen. They were only about $30 each, incredibly reasonable even then. With my girlfriend I drove the Kombi across Europe to Milan to collect the two prints. I found them extraordinary. I called Michael Parkin long distance and asked if he could find anything else by Weitzel. When I returned to London he had located several more black and white images of Sydney subjects. He told me a story of an old suitcase being discovered, packed with linocuts from the Claude Flight School. And, when I returned to Australia, I managed to track down a couple more. All of these Weitzel linocuts are now in the National Gallery of Australia. In Sydney Moderns – Art for a New World, curated by Deborah Edwards and Denise Mimmocchi, at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2013, there were nine works by Weitzel included in the exhibition. I believe the work that Weitzel produced in Sydney is by far the most Modern, the most forward-thinking and the most socially aware of any artist working in the country at the time.

Looking for employment in London in 1931 Weitzel had sought out author David Garnett, who was also a publisher and member of the Bloomsbury Group of artists-craftsmen. While Garnett was not interested in Weitzel's drawings for publication he became an admirer of Weitzel’s sculpture and invited him to care-take his property 'Hilton Hall', at the same time commissioning him to do heads of his children. Weitzel came to be praised by Jacob Epstein, Roger Fry, Paul Nash and Duncan Grant. Garnett describes Weitzel in his autobiography as 'small, thin, with frizzy hair which stood piled up on his head, blue eyed, with a beaky nose. I guessed he was not eating enough… He was proletarian, rather helpless, very eager about art and also about communism'. At around this time Weitzel wrote to Colin Simpson back in Australia: 'Now I am working on a show of my own which is being arranged for me by some terrific money bags’. The exhibition was never held. Weitzel contracted tetanus apparently from minerals that had got under his fingernails while digging for clay for his sculptures. He died on the twenty-second of February 1932 at the age of 26.

For a time I corresponded with David Garnett’s son, Richard, who sent me a package of photographs of Weitzel’s sculpture produced in England. [I gave these photographs to the National Gallery of Australia, retaining copies.]

Weitzel had been born in Levin, Aotearoa New Zealand. He had just begun art school, at the age of 16, when he left for San Francisco in 1921 with his mother and one of his sisters. Although he never returned, New Zealand has ‘re-adopted’ him. Examples of his works have entered New Zealand public art galleries and in 2005 Gail Ross wrote an excellent article on him for Art-New Zealand (issue 116) which focuses particularly on the family’s left-wing political views and activities. She has him leaving both NZ and Australia because of political pressure.

An obituary was written by Ethel Anderson for Art in Australia, August 1932, and a posthumous exhibition was organised by Dorrit Black at the Modern Art Centre, 56 Margaret St, Sydney in June, 1933. Weitzel’s sister had travelled to London to bring back all his remaining work. As well as linocuts, sculpture and drawings, this small show (41 works) included poster designs for the Empire Marketing Board, Underground Railways, Shell Motor Spirit, Barclay's Lager and The Prudential Insurance Co. I do not know of any copies of these posters. Also unlocated are the following linocuts: Carnival (referred to in a book on linocutting by Claude Flight), Lillies (exhibited in the 1931 Exhibiton of British Linocuts), Strelitzia and Shell Factories (both exhibited at the posthumous exhibition, 1933).