Frederick Franck, an artist and author whose sculptures, sketches, paintings and more than 30 books reflect a constant search for the core of spirituality, has died at his home in Warwick, N.Y., near a park dedicated to peace that he studded with his own works. He was 97.
He died June 5 of congestive heart failure, his son, Lukas, said.
More than 70 of Mr. Franck’s works are exhibited at Pacem in Terris, the 6-acre sculpture park and meditation space that he and his wife of 46 years, Claske Berndes Franck, built. It is on the site of an old stone grist mill by the Wayawanda River.
His spare steel, glass and wood sculptures depicting mystical motifs stand in public spaces throughout the country, including four on the streets of the struggling Central Ward of Newark, N.J. Intended to symbolize rebirth, the Newark sculptures include a large-petalled flower with a red and gold stained-glass center, and a phoenix rising from its perch.
Paintings and drawings by Mr. Franck are also in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Among Mr. Franck’s books are “The Zen of Seeing–Seeing/Drawing as Meditation” (1973), and “To Be Human Against All Odds” (1991).
Mr. Franck was the son of a shopkeeper in Maastricht, Netherlands. He earned a degree in dental surgery from the Antwerp School of Dentistry in 1935.
But Mr. Franck later told his son that as a 5-year-old, at the outset of World War I, he watched out the window of his home as German troops marched past, preceded by a stream of refugees. The war, he said, inspired a lifelong struggle to comprehend and portray human spirituality.
“It gave him a horror of war that’s reflected in all of his writings and his artwork,” Lukas Franck said.
Aware of the Nazi threat, Mr. Franck moved to England in the mid-1930s, then to Scotland, where he earned another degree in dentistry. In 1939, he moved to the United States, working as a dental surgeon at several hospitals. From 1946 to 1966, he intermittently practiced dentistry a few days a week in Manhattan.
In 1957, the Francks traveled to Lambarene, Gabon, in West Africa, where for three years they worked with Albert Schweitzer. There, Mr. Franck opened a dental clinic, though spending much of his time sketching the jungle, people in a leper colony and Schweitzer. His book, “My Days with Albert Schweitzer” (1958), described that journey in words and drawings.
Three times in the early 1960s, the Francks traveled to Rome to witness Pope John XXIII’s ecumenical council. Mr. Franck recorded the council in a portfolio of spare, realistic drawings, and the reforms of Pope John XXIII became one of Mr. Franck’s seminal influences.
Pacem in Terris is dedicated to the pope, to Schweitzer and to Dr. Daisetz Suzuki, credited by many with introducing Zen Buddhism to the West.
