Frank Mechau

American, 1904-1946

BiographyDetermined from an early age to forge an artistic career, after graduating from high school in Glenwood Springs in western Colorado, Mechau pursued the study of art in Denver, Chicago, and New York City. In 1929, having found the formalism of art schools uninspiring, newly married he departed for Paris. His own work developed significantly, and in his three years in Paris, in the course of which his paintings were exhibited, he received high praise from prominent art critics. Rich as his experience in Europe was, Mechau nevertheless yearned to return home feeling, as he put it, "an extreme desire to get back to nature and life in Colorado".

Upon returning to Colorado in 1932 at the height of the great depression, Mechau taught at the Vance Kirkland School of Art in Denver, and briefly had his own school. Among his particularly talented students were Jenne and Ethel Magafan and Eduardo Chavez, whom he trained to become his apprentices and mural assistants. They themselves subsequently became highly accomplished painters and muralists. Thus began a major facet of Mechau's career, which was his inspired teaching of drawing and painting.

A major boost to Mechau both as a means of sustaining himself and his family and as an opportunity to develop his art, were commissions awarded him through the New Deal art programs of the Roosevelt administration to paint murals in public buildings. His first mural, Horses at Night, painted in 1934 hangs in the Denver Public Library. When exhibited in the Corcoran Gallery in Wash., D.C. it was praised as "the greatest work of art which had been produced under the project." In all, he painted eleven such murals, including two in Washington, D.C. one of which, Dangers of the Mail, has stirred much controversy. Mechau's achievements were further recognized in 1934 by his being awarded a Guggenheim fellowship that was later twice renewed.

Mechau taught at the Broadmoor Art Academy and was engaged by Boardman Robinson to join the faculty at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center. In 1940 he became head of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at Columbia University. In 1943 Mechau took leave from Columbia University to participate in a War Department project in which artists were selected to portray U.S. military activities around the world. He was assigned to the region around Panama in which he travelled widely. Based on his observations and sketches, some of which depict very unmilitary-like scenes of natives and native life, he completed a series of paintings now in the Army Art Museum. After that, he decided to devote himself full time to painting at home with his family in the mountains of western Colorado. As fate would have it, however, little more than two years remained for him as his life was cut short when he died from a heart attack at age 42.

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