Frank Frazetta - 1928 - 2010
December 19, 2010
Frazetta Family Feud is re-ignited over claims of non-distribution of earnings
Frank Frazetta on this site:
Not surprising to fans who have been following the ongoing Frazetta family debacle, Frank Frazetta, Jr., has filed a lawsuit to force an accounting of the doings of the Frazetta family trust. An Associated Press report at ABC News online carries the details:
"Frazetta Jr.'s latest complaint alleges that his siblings — Billy Frazetta, Holly Frazetta Taylor and Heidi Grabin — had violated the terms of the settlement by failing to pay him the 25–percent share of the estate his father intended him to have. He also claims they have not provided an accurate accounting of the business dealings involving his father's art and have not involved him in their decisions as agreed.
"It's been continuous pleading with them to try to figure out what's going on," said Frazetta Jr.'s Miami attorney, Diana L. Fitzgerald. The suit was filed in Florida because Frazetta Jr.'s sisters live here."
July 22, 2010
Conan The Destroyer sells for $1.5 million USD
Well, the land rush continues on the high-profile Frank Frazetta paintings with "Destroyer" going for $1.5 million to a private collector. "Conan the Conqueror" (also called "The Berserker") went for $1 million USD in November of 2009. "Conan the Destroyer" is probably the second best known Conan painting by Frazetta (number one being "Conan the Adventurer,"also called "The Barbarian".) Frazetta's ink drawing for EC Comics Weird Science Fantasy #29 sold for $380,000 recently.
How long until "Rogues in the House" (AKA simply "Conan") and "The Snow Giants" ("Conan of Cimmeria") go?
"...Managers Robert Pistella and Stephen Ferzoco call the price the highest ever for a work by Frazetta.
...In recent years, his children have fought over an estate estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars."
July 18, 2010
Frazetta Family celebration held
Article at the Pocono Record Writer covering the event, written by Howard Frank.
"A tribute was held Saturday in East Stroudsburg for the Marshalls Creek-based master artist who died on May 10 at the age of 82.
..."Frank was a pleasant, quiet man who wasn't interested in the limelight" Attorney Gerry Geiger said. "He just wanted to paint."
"The art — he didn't do it for the fame. He was a humble man," Frazetta's daughter Holly said."
The entire article carries various stories about Frazetta, along with some reminisces by fans.
July 17, 2010
The Pocono Record has an announcement about a special Frank Frazetta fan appreciation event hosted by Bill, Holly and Heidi Frazetta in East Stroudsburg set for Saturday, July 17.
"The Saturday event will feature a documentary on the life of Frank Frazetta, and representations of his life work will be on display. There will be a slide show with both published and private photos Frazetta and his family.
Those attending will receive memorabilia, including a copy of the artist's self-portrait.
"I just want to do something that is going to be meaningful to the fans, and those who were involved with us and our lives," Bill said. "And do it in a way that my dad would have enjoyed himself."
June 9, 2010
Frazetta's cover to Weird Science Fantasy #29 sells for $380k
Click to enlarge to view Frazetta artwork
When alive, Frank Frazetta boasted that he had turned down offers of $250,000 for this artwork, and that it ran as a cover for EC Comics in 1955 only because it was rejected by its intended publisher, Famous Funnies. Frazetta took it to EC Comics, and was able to work out a special deal to keep the original artwork, perhaps the only time EC Comics publisher Bill Gaines made such a deal during the halcyon days when EC was only a comic book publisher.
Story about the sell of the piece at the Pocono Record
"The original artwork for a comic book cover drawn in 1955 by the late fantasy artist and Marshalls Creek resident Frank Frazetta just sold for a record-setting $380,000.
The pen-and-ink drawing was purchased by Heritage Auctions co-founder Jim Halperin.
...The cover is the first piece of Frazetta art to be sold since the artist's death May 10.
"Frazetta did a total of 42 comic book covers, many of which are no longer thought to exist as original art, though WSF No. 29 is by far his most famous." Halperin said.
Halperin was approached by agents for the Frazetta family to sell the art.
"I was thrilled to pay their asking price," he said, "which, although it set a new record by a wide margin, actually seemed quite fair for the ultimate EC cover."
UPDATE MAY 2011: The Frazetta record for highest price paid for a single piece of comic book art was beat by the sell of a Frank Miller splash page for $448K. Read about the Frank Miller artwork here.
MAY 10, 2010: Frazetta has died
Returning home from a “Mother’s Day” meal, Frazetta complained of pain and was rushed to a hospital where he later expired. Cause of death is attributed to a stroke. Easily the preeminent fantasy book illustrator of the 60s and 70s, Frazetta is also famous for highly-regarded 1950’s comic book work and for a long string of covers for the Warren Magazines.
Frank Frazetta Appreciation
This had been a tough past year for Frazetta Sr: his wife and de facto business manager Ellie Frazetta died of cancer in July 2009, and then in December son Frazetta Jr. staged a raid on the Frazetta Museum with the (apparently) dubious task of kidnapping the bulk of the Frazetta Museum artwork to put it into storage to keep it out of the hands of his three other siblings. Besides the legal problems from this event, there was much news made of the fallout from claims and counter-claims being made within the family about a $1 million dollar sale of "Conan the Conqueror" to guitarist Kirk Hammett. In April Frazetta came out of a kind of exile at his home in Boca Grande island in Florida to get the family feud settled and to straighten out the tangle of legal deals surrounding the copyrights for Frazetta Properties corp.
I have been expecting a death announcement since last year with the completely non-clinical idea that most couples married fifty plus years typically do not long outlive each other. Having dodged a number of life-threatening health problems over the last two decades (severe thyroid problems, strokes), Frazetta probably had already outlived expectations. Nonetheless, he kept drawing (left handed after losing his right in a stroke) and touching up paintings. And there were periodically announcements made at the web site run by Frank Jr. for new merchandising deals based on his artwork.
Frank Frazetta obits:
- Art Beat blog announces Frazetta's death - New York Times
- No mainstream outlet has followed the Frazetta family with the same dedication as the Pocono Record
- Frazetta dead at 82 - National Record Record
- Heidi MacDonald - The Beat
Though Frazetta the company had become an "intellectual property" marketer with T-shirts, clocks, posters and everything else one can sell with an image plastered to it, Frazetta the artist was a much-loved author of images that spanned from comics to books to movie posters, and he was (rightly) revered by artists for a technical ability and a compositional style that, whether you liked his art or not, influenced just about everything that followed in his wake. I have seen innumerable images on movie screens that were obviously related to specific paintings by Frazetta, or at least in style were only a generation apart from his artwork themes and styles.
"The Michelangelo of Fantasy Art"
Obviously similar to Michelangelo by possessing the same kind of anatomical obsessions, and for focusing his images into a kind of 'theology of the body' which Michelangelo held to, there are telling differences. Michelangelo Buonarroti was a trained anatomist who engaged in dissection on corpses under the supervision of medical personnel in order to learn as much as possible about the true functioning and shapes of muscles. In contrast, Frazetta trained himself using George Bridgman's famous guide "Anatomy for Artists" and he also employed an apparent photographic memory drawing from photographs, life drawing and his own imagination.
Whereas Michelangelo challenged his contemporary critics to find error in his anatomy (he was accused of making up parts of the bulging and twisting bodies he used in sculpture and painting) there was apparently no success in debunking him. Frazetta, though, readily admitted that he distorted and caricatured his figures to bring them into line with what he wanted to present.
Frazetta and photography
Though Frazetta claimed to not use reference photographs and to instead rely upon memory and his own talent for invention, this is of course not true for some of his most commercial work like the caricatured portrait of Ringo Star for Mad Magazine which got him the attention that led to his movie poster career and all of the likenesses he was called upon to expertly create.
Pop culture images were in his head and came out in many ways, for example DeMille's "Cleopatra" and other films, from King Kong to westerns and so forth. Illustrators like N. C. Wyeth traveled in the American West to gather first-hand the visual information he used for paintings of cowboys, but Frazetta's renditions of the same were based upon movies and television. But this is also where Frazetta's distinction comes out: his force in his artwork is from his personal understanding of the athletic shape and performance of a human body under stress, and getting the peripheral costuming correct is much less important, whereas it would be paramount in a trained illustrator like Wyeth or a Remington. Frazetta's focus transcended likeness, blandishments of even a specific culture, but went towards the universality of the human form, and this is what ultimately couples him with an artist like Michelangelo.
As an avid collector of cameras Frazetta certainly had the means and ability to use photos as tools. There are in print in Frazetta literature many black and white images which showed studies in contrast and lighting of either Frazetta himself or a colleague that appear to be instrumental in the black and white artwork he was producing in comic books in the 1950s. Frazetta educated himself in many ways and seems to have known how to assemble a seed bed of visuals to pull from for his own imaginative purposes.
But no reference image could exist for the way Frazetta depicted the fluid motion and the thrust of action he could bring out in his images. Artists use any number of "crutches" to get over not knowing how something looks in a certain situation, but only an imagination combined with a familiarity with athletic, physical action can account for figure motion like Frazetta.
Frazetta's style
Frazetta had the subtlety to dilute the brutality with other emotions on the canvas. His Barbarian scenes often show a sense of panic and dread by both the victor and the defeated. There's some ambiguity about what's happening, though Frazetta wasn't adverse to throwing in a little editorial in the sides, such as the death figure leering at the leaping figure of a mounted Conan in "The Conqueror" painting sold to Hammett.)
Frazetta never made claims like Michelangelo did in that Florentines war with his critics. Rather Frazetta was interested in "knocking their eyes out" with his imagination and an embellishing style that only got better as Frazetta aged, even though his drawing talent had declined, and the action-oriented work that he excelled at like no other (like the 1960s Conan paperback covers) were replaced in the 1980s with a stiffer, posing imagery that was no longer trying to capture "the peak moment" (as Frazetta called it.)
Death Dealer
An example of this transition is his possibly most famous work, "Death Dealer" which is a beautiful, menacing artwork of a classic death image, but it is a still image that only implies all the mayhem and aggression that was found in much of Frazetta's earlier work. I think that during the 1970s, Frazetta had "made it" and this translated into his artwork: instead of the 'peak moment' of action, the figures frequently had already done the deed and were now basking in (or posing for) the accolades that followed. But, Frazetta had earned it, and so too his imagery.
In his later years Frazetta tinkered regularly with older images, sometimes improving, and sometimes not (or simply finishing them, Frazetta being famous for 24 and 48 hour orgies of focused labor, which did not always mean the most 'finished' of color illustrations during the 1960s). He only produced a handful or two of new images, instead he either copied his own work in variations (like Death Dealer running, Death Dealer Standing, etc) or he helped package older images for new merchandising applications.
Usually this tinkering made for a much better embellishing effect, but not always a better composition, or it would simply degrade the image as a piece of artwork. For example, he might rework an old paperback cover, changing the focus from being the fright of a woman facing a ferocious animal in the wild, to instead simply cheesecake with all the focus on a spectacularly rendered naked derriere.
But artists who live long enough often go back to "fix" older works, sometimes they get lost without a sense of what their younger self intended.
A Defense of Frazetta
If this sounds like simple criticism, remember Frazetta was still drawing and painting but only with his left hand, the right hand destroyed (for useful art purposes) by a stroke. Like Renoir who had to have his brushes bandaged to his arthritic hands (he couldn't hold them), Frazetta kept working even though he was long past the stage where he was needing to earn a living and feed a family. Even though he and his wife initiated a "Frazetta Museum" on their property to display the bulk of his work and to keep the original images within the control of his family, I am convinced that during the next fifty years these more famous paintings will get over the hurdle of "fine art" which barricades commercial illustrators from mainline museums, and we will start seeing his relatively small canvas and masonite images in the most staid and benign establishment arsenals of "officially approved" art.
When I see Frazetta paintings, especially the images he made in his prime working years after he was blackballed by Al Capp after Frazetta spent years on 'ghosting' the comic strip tales of Dogpatch, I don't just see a phantasy image illustrating a (often) second rate adventure-quasi-scifi tale. Instead I see the aggressive, often angry and fear-filled violence of an independent artist and illustrator fighting to make a living while dealing with art directors and the terror of the sink-or-swim reality of the commercial art market.
In fact, I think the viewer with an eye for the details of Frazetta's work will note the startling constancy that Frazetta's heroic figures typically resemble Frazetta himself (look at the eyes and cheek bones), and the women typically all resemble variations on his wife Ellie. Like American writer Edgar Allen Poe who seems to have regularly only been writing about himself in his tales, regardless of the actual character in a story, Frank Frazetta seems to have been regularly simply drawing and painting self-portraits.
This essay updated June 9 2010.
OLD NEWS: The Frazetta Feud "Officially Over"
April 26, 2010: The Pocono Record, and other news outlets have been reporting the end of the Frazetta Museum family fight after agreements were reached by Frazetta Sr and his kids through a federal mediator and their attorneys. Here's some of the highlights:
- Trademark infringement case dropped by Frazetta Sr - Pocono Record
- "Death Dealer Statue" commission for U.S.Army at the center of the trademark infringement case - Pocono Record
- Frazetta Dispute Over - cbc.ca online
- "Ghost of Ellie" website has gone offline
The Frazetta Museum Feud
April 21, 2010: The Pocono Record, which has been monitoring local celebrity Frank Frazetta pretty closely as his internal family squables unfold into legal cases, now reports another burglary at the home of Frazetta Sr:
"The Marshalls Creek home of artist Frank Frazetta Sr. was burglarized sometime over the past few weeks, and among the missing items is a gun collection.
The theft was discovered Monday night at about 7:30 when Frank Sr. and his son Bill Frazetta went to the home. Frank Sr. has been staying at his Florida home over the last several weeks.
No inventory of missing items had been taken yet, but Frank Sr. noticed several cameras and a gun collection he'd accumulated over many years were gone, according to Heidi Grabin, Frank Sr.'s daughter.
A knife was found outside one of the home's windows. The window appeared to have chipped paint, as though it had been jimmied. Grabin also said it appeared the thief rifled through a photo album and placed a picture of Frank Sr.'s late wife, Ellie, on his desk."
April 1, 2010: A vigil to demonstrate in favor of preserving the East Stroudsburg, PA ''Frazetta Museum' was held on March 26. As usual, the Pocono Record covered the story with good detail:
"About 50 family, friends and fans gathered in the yard and spoke about the legendary comic book artist as a family man and an artistic inspiration.
His grandchildren beamed in candlelight as one person recalled them begging, "Grandpa, draw me something." The artist got out the sidewalk chalk and pretty soon they'd have a masterpiece.
Many spoke in remembrance of Ellie, considered the glue of the family. Ellie handled all the business issues, leaving Frank Sr. to paint.
"If she were here, this never would have happened," someone said.
John Harding, longtime pastor to Frank Sr. and Ellie, said after she died, a lot of decisions were made in a hurry."
March 26, 2010: The Frazetta Feud goes on. Recent web sites online seem to advance the interests of the parties involved: theghostofellie (named after Frank Frazetta Srs wife Ellie Frazetta) takes the side of Alfonso Frazetta Jr. And the site frankfrazettamuseum seems to be on the side of the other three Frazetta children, and has the bonus of Frank Frazetta himself speaking in online video from his place at Boca Grande in Florida.
[Below: Screenshot of the Frazetta Museum site, which has apparently replaced the older frankfrazettagallery site]
Frazetta looks 'lucid'in the online video, which is the main point I think they're trying to get across, to counter the claims that Frazetta Sr is lost in dementia and being held against his will. The video has a bit of travelogue of the local area at Boca Grande with a soundtrack of Caribbean drums playing, and Frazetta himself seems to be having a good time with grandkids and his daughters in the video. It made me happy to see the old guy apparently enjoying himself.
[Below: The Ghost of Ellie blog site.]
From the beginning, no one has covered this as well as the Pennsylvania newspaper Pocono Record, they've had multiple stories and video on the matter rightoff from the original 'burglary' attempt at the Museum in December of 2009.
Frazetta Sr was interviewed in a March 26 issue of the Pocono Record:
"Frank Sr. said he didn't understand why his son thought he had permission to take his paintings. But he doesn't think Frank Jr. was acting in his best interests, as the son has claimed.
"No, absolutely not. I don't know what the hell he was doing," Frank Sr. said.
Frank Jr. and his wife, Lori Frazetta, have claimed Frank Sr. was being controlled by the other three siblings, and held against his will in Florida.
Frank Sr. denied the accusation.
"I'm in my own home," he said. "I'm the only one who lives here. Yes, absolutely I'm under my own free will. My daughters don't tell me what to do. I'm a man of my own word."
Frank Jr. awaits trial in Monroe County Court on charges of burglary, theft by unlawful taking and criminal trespass. But with his son's fate in the balance, Frank Sr. only wishes for one thing: "I would like to see them all shut up and be pals like they once were."
Frank Jr. is free on $50,000 bail with the stipulation that he not discuss the case or any of the family feud with his father. But if the senior Frazetta could say one thing to his son, what would it be?
"I'd send a cease and desist. He's got one of my paintings. No name, a pretty girl running on a sandy beach. He took it from the house. It really was unfinished," Frank Sr. said.
'What does he think — I'm dead?'
Frank Sr. spends his days going to ball games, enjoying his surroundings and spending time with his family. "I like it here. It's beautiful," he said.
And he still paints — he's got a bunch of paintings he started but never finished. But he also reads. And he's become aware of many of the accusations Frank Jr.'s made against his children. He'd like to straighten that out.
"Don't you believe anything he tells you. He's full of beans. He wants to run the museum by himself. He wants the whole thing to himself. What does he think — I'm dead? He's really gone, he's gone haywire," Frank Sr. said.
He also believes the feud has left a blotch on his reputation as an artist.
"As a matter of fact, I do. I really do. My daughters are both upset. I can't even face it. I don't know what the heck is going on. It's insane. Nothing more nothing less," he said."
March 16, 2010: The situation over Frazetta Srs artwork gets crazier as lawsuits hit the courts. Frank Sr. is supposedly laying infringement charges protecting his copyright ownership against Frazetta Jr. This is on top of Frazetta Jr's Burglary charges from last December which is slowly moving through the PA court system. Courthouse news has the story on the suit between father against son.
Bianco notarized the document and returned it to Frank Sr. She also said she revoked a power-of-attorney held by the artist's other three children, Bill Frazetta of East Stroudsburg and sisters Holly Taylor and Heidi Gravin, both of Florida.
Frank Jr. was charged Dec. 9 with stealing 90 of his father's paintings housed in the family museum near Marshalls Creek. He contends he was trying to inventory and secure the paintings for his father and that he had to use a backhoe to gain entry to the museum because he had chained the doors a few days prior."
One disturbing aspect of this is the online video at Pocono in which Lori Frazetta, Jr's wife, says to the effect that Frazetta Sr is not being properly cared for (he is currently in Florida). Frank Frazetta Sr is 81 years old.
A longer news report is at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
"Alfonso Frank Frazetta forcefully entered his father's art museum on Business Route 209 in Smithfield Township by damaging a door with a backhoe, then pulling it off its hinges, police said. Frazetta was helped by another man who was operating the backhoe. Charges are pending against that man, police said.
Police said once inside, Frazetta stole about 90 paintings and was loading them into a truck when he was caught by police. He is charged with burglary, criminal trespass and theft."
The director of the museum, Eleanor "Ellie" Frazetta, died on July 17, 2009 after a long battle with cancer.
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