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Frank McEwen, who died on January 15, 1994, was one of the most outstanding of that small group of outsiders who have promoted and encouraged African artists in the twentieth century.
Frank was born on April 19, 1907, in Mexico. At the outbreak of World War I he was sent to a coastal village in Devon, where he learned his lifelong love of sailing. At the age of 19, Frank left for Paris, and was based in France for nearly thirty years, studying art history with Henri Focillon. He became acquainted with the leading artists, including Braque, Picasso, Matisse, and Leger; like them, he was greatly influenced by Gustave Moreau. Frank later said (in a radio talk in 1988), "Moreau's method of drawing out individuality in artists was exactly opposed to the nefarious proceedings of art schools which oppress and destroy individual artists." During his time in France, Frank established his reputation as an authority on modern art. He arranged, for the British Council, the first exhibition of Henry Moore in Paris, in 1945; characteristically, he later remarked to me, "Moore was not a patch on Sylvester Mubayi."
In 1956, at age 49, Frank began a remarkable new chapter in his life when he went to Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), to assume the directorship of the Rhodes National Gallery, which had been formally inaugurated the previous year. Although the Trustees had envisaged the Gallery as a place for showing European art, Frank immediately became a champion of indigenous artists, soon forming a National Gallery Workshop. Among those at the Workshop were Thomas Mukarobgwa (who, along with other artists, was employed as a gallery attendant). Frank was a willing and excited...