NEW YORK.- Distinguished art dealer Allan Frumkin, 75, died in Manhattan due to complications from Crohn’s disease. He specialized in European and American modern art. He had art galleries in Chicago and New York for more than forty years. Among the artists he exhibited were H. C. Westermann, Peter Saul, Robert Arneson, Philip Pearlstein, Leon Golub and William T. Wiley. He also presented early Mondrian landscapes, Munch prints, Miró drawings and Matta pastels; and displayed African and pre-Columbian art.  

 

 

Allan Frumkin was born in Chicago in 1927. Frumkin studied at the University of Chicago. He first wanted to be an architectural historian. He studied at the Chicago Institute of Design, and there he was invited to organize the school’s annual art auction. He visited Paris, Italy and England in 1950 and met artists like Matta, Léger, Henry Moore and Giacometti. He then opened up a "New York style painting gallery" in Chicago in 1952. During the gallery’s first season, it exhibited the first Chicago shows of Cornell and Matta. LAter there were solo exhibitions for Walter Murch, Franz Kline, Golub, Richard Diebenkorn, Saul Steinberg, June Leaf, Paul Klee and Emile Nolde. In 1959 he opened his New York gallery with artists like William Beckmann, James McGarrell and Jack Beal and the California artists Robert Hudson, Roy De Forest and Joan Brown.  

 

The Saint Louis Art Museum acquired two weeks ago Frumkin’s collection of 382 prints by the German Expressionist Max Beckmann.