Frank Paulin

(Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1926 - 2016)

American

Frank Paulin grew up in Chicago where his facility in drawing the human figure, noticed while he was a student at the Art Institute, landed him a job in commercial fashion illustration at Whitaker-Christiansen Studio at the precocious age of 16. As a soldier in the U.S. Army, he was assigned the job of making I.D. shots of displaced people at a Signal Depot in Nuremberg, Germany in 1946. (On his own, he also photographed the rubblestrewn squalor in German cities, a body of work of which hardly anything remains.) Upon his return, he took up art school once again, at the Institute of Design, the “New Bauhaus” directed by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. With that curriculum in the dynamics of visual structure, light, and perception behind him, he launched himself into the New York fashion world, in 1953, at first drawing, then photographing high style manikins for the great department stores. He speaks very fondly of the personalities he met there, and of the setups he worked with.1 In 1953, Paulin returned to New York and continued as a freelance fashion illustrator. While most of his time was occupied with work, he began walking the city’s streets at night and found a fascination for street and documentary photography. In 1957, Paulin had his first solo show at the iconic Limelight Gallery. Frank Paulin’s work has been exhibited at numerous institutions including the Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Art.

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