Frank N. Wilcox

A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Frank N. Wilcox studied with Henry Keller, Louis Rorimer, F. C. Gottwald, and Horace E. Potter at the Cleveland School of Art.  Upon his graduation in 1910, he traveled to Paris on scholarship to study at the Académie Callorossio, and his work was accepted into the Paris Salon of 1911. In 1913, Wilcox was invited to join the faculty at the Cleveland School of Art, where he taught until 1957. Charles E. Burchfield was one of his students. Their relationship developed into friendship that extended beyond the classroom. They went on sketching expeditions together, joined by Keller and occasionally others.

Wilcox had his first solo exhibition at the Taylor Gallery in the fall of 1911.  Upon his return from France in 1913, the Korner and Wood Gallery organized his second show.  In 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I, Wilcox went to Germany and Holland. Two years later he married Florence Bard, a fellow art student, and the two spent most of their honeymoon painting outdoors at Henry Keller’s summer school in Berlin Heights, Ohio.  Along with other notable artists, Wilcox was a member of the Kokoon Club, an art collaborative dedicated to the pursuit of artistic endeavors not embraced by the Cleveland mainstream.  In 1939 the Cleveland School of Art mounted a Wilcox exhibition, and repeated the honor in 1952.

Wilcox was also a consistent exhibitor and prizewinner in The Cleveland Museum of Art’s annual May Show, especially in the watercolor category. In the 1930s he participated in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He also exhibited at the Kraushaar Galleries in New York.

 Baldwin-Wallace College presented a Wilcox memorial exhibition in 1966 and the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio mounted a Wilcox retrospective in 1969. His work has been featured in exhibitions organized by the Cleveland Artists Foundation, including Transformations in Cleveland Art in 1996 and A Brush with Light: Watercolor Painters of Northeast Ohio in 1998.

Resource: Scheele, Bill and John Jaeger. Frank N. Wilcox (1887-1964): A Retrospective Catalogue. Cleveland Heights, OH: The Passionate Collector, Inc., 1992. (illus., n.p.)