Solo Booth at THE ADAA Art Show • PARK AVENUE ARMORY (643 Park AvE.):
Oct. 29 - Nov. 2 (BOOTH D26)
Gallery Exhibition: Nov. 1 - Dec. 7
Ricco/Maresca Gallery is thrilled to introduce the work of Franne Davids with two concurrent exhibitions: a solo booth at The Art Show, organized by the Art Dealers Association of America and her debut gallery show at our Chelsea space. True discoveries are rare in the artworld, and Franne Davids is one of them. After dedicating her entire life to her art, her work now embarks on a life of its own.
Frances Beth Davids, known as Franne to those close to her, was born in Connecticut on December 17, 1950. The eldest of two children in the prototypical American Jewish family, she was the teenage girl with the bouffant sixties' haircut and wearing a swing dress. By then Franne had discovered the gift of art within her, and she intended to allow it to flourish. Little did she know that the seed of mental illness would eventually consume her entire life, eradicating any prospect of an art career in the public eye, but blossoming into an extensive oeuvre that developed in isolation.
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All:
Untitled, ca. 1979 - 2018
Oil on canvas -
After graduating from high school in 1968, Franne endeavored to get a college education, attending several institutions for brief periods that were punctuated by psychotic breaks. By the late 1970s she was formally diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and had to move back to her parents’ house in Waterbury, Connecticut, where she lived for the rest of her life, and where she died in 2022.Thrust into the self-fulfilling prophesy of the “outsider” artist, Franne fell headfirst into the black hole of her mental illness. Her reality was fractured and a lush fantasy world, rendered in paint, was born.
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The basement of the house became her studio and haven, and she was left alone to wander the mysterious trails of her nonconforming brain. “There was no struggle for sanity going on here,” says her sister-in-law, Francine; “she could be as crazy . . . as she could be.”
Modern psychopharmacology, which began the year of Franne’s birth with the synthesis of chlorpromazine, was still in its infancy and shrouded in stigma at the time of her diagnosis. For most of her life she was on and off treatment and medication, mostly off by her own choosing. Her writings—journal entries, letters never sent, and prose poems—reveal a stream of consciousness that was sometimes lucid; oftentimes disjointed and impenetrable.
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The nature of her hallucinations was unclear to her family, who believe they were mostly auditory: “The ladies in her paintings are definitely part of that,” says Francine. “She would talk to them; she had relationships with them.”
Between her mid-twenties and early middle age, Franne occasionally ventured to New York City alone, disappearing for days. She would go to MoMA, where she believed her art was on display, returning angry with the certainty that the museum had “stolen” her paintings. -
In late adulthood, Franne’s forays into the city were few and far between, she withdrew further from the world and immersed herself in art making, spending most of every day in her basement studio, but none of her work ever saw the light of day.
A number of 35mm color slides document some of her paintings that no longer exist, evidence that Franne reworked and overpainted many of her works—likely several times. The surface of her canvases and works on paper is so thick with paint that it still carries the aroma of oil. Family members were allowed few occasional glimpses into the Franne’s basement studio, but they remember that, especially in her later years, she would sit for long periods of time pondering over her work.
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Franne’s paintings almost always revolve around a specific cast of characters, groups of women very closely gathered in flattened interiors. In work after work, she insists on the same general scenario and motifs: a personal folklore rendered in dense patterning and vibrant palettes; even objects pulsate with mysterious exuberance. We know that Franne lived in an animistic universe: she believed a broken refrigerator could heal itself, and that there was a voice inside a smoke detector that belonged to an elf. We also know that she held onto a childlike wonder: fairytales and chivalric romance occupied an important place in her personal library, and she delighted in watching vintage animation and Disney cartoon films.
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Raw yet refined, and thoroughly her own, Franne’s paintings evoke a playful cross section of visual affinities, from Madge Gill’s ethereal female faces and Aloïse Corbaz’s voluptuous horror vacui to the dreamlike theatricality of Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse’s still lifes, and even William Hawkins’s fearless figurative abstraction and bold use of color. In the last ten years of her life, it is likely she produced only small works, a percentage of which seem to be self-portraits.
In 2013 Franne’s mother, Sonya, passed away. She had been the person most responsible for seeing that her daughter remained cradled in her fantasy cocoon. Franne continued to live in the Waterbury house and at one point started wearing Sonya’s clothes, as in senior age they had both come to weigh some 300 pounds. In 2019 Franne was diagnosed with cancer that after a period of remission spread to her lungs and brain.
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During her final hospitalization, she repeatedly asked her brother Noah and sister-in-law Francine to make sure her purse was kept safe. Only after she passed away did they open this “old, falling apart” thing and discover it was jammed with every identification card that Franne ever owned, including her grammar school ID.
It took the family more than a year to clear out the contents of the house; many decades of “neat hoarding,” as Noah describes it. When it came to Franne’s work, they were overwhelmed... “We didn’t know what to do with her art,” says Francine. “We certainly didn’t want to put it in the dumpster.”
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Oil on paper14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm)(FD 441) -
EXHIBITION CATALOG
ALSO AVAILABLE IN PRINT -
Concurrently on view in Gallery Two:
John D. Monteith:
The Long Winter of Our Tedious Southern Summer
Visit the online viewing room here.
