Our agency is delighted to have partnered with the Utah State Capitol Preservation Board to install five paintings by Edna Merrill Van Frank at the new North Capitol Building, where the state art collection will be housed. These artworks were created in the 1940s as commercial decorations for Auerbach’s department store. This rival of ZCMI, located in downtown Salt Lake City, sold a variety of goods across five floors and a basement. Merrill, as she liked to be known, was a fashion illustrator at the store and was asked to take on the immense task of creating large historic murals to commemorate the Utah Centennial of 1947.
Paintings by Merrill in the state collection include “Salt Palace,” “Silver Lake Winter Sports,” “Fort Douglas Bandstand,” “Salt Lake Theatre,” “Saltair,” “Ward House Celebration,” and “Brigham Street.” These paintings were generously donated by the Van Frank family to the State of Utah Alice Merrill Horne Art Collection.
One of the artworks is a 320-inch mural, which took a village and lots of heavy lifting to install. By the numbers, the installation required one semi-truck, 12 professional movers, more than 100 feet of straps, more than 15 blankets, and two dollies. The moving crew had to navigate a grueling trek up 36 steps. The mural took at least 15 hours of expert conservation and a 20-foot cleat to hold it all together.
Our division extends heartfelt thanks to our colleagues at the Utah State Capitol Preservation Board, who identified spaces for the murals and coordinated and funded transportation and installation in the North Capitol Building. Many thanks also to the conservator, Yasuko Ogino of Mobile Art Conservation Services; the framer, Ryan Harrington of Harrington Art Studio; and Bailey’s Moving & Storage. Their expertise was essential to this project.
You can see the mural and some of Merrill’s other works at the Utah State Capitol Campus.
A brief biography of the artist:
Edna Ensign Merrill was born in 1899 in Logan to a family who belonged to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. She grew up and graduated from Utah Agricultural College (now Utah State University). Dissatisfied with the limits placed on art training at the college (particularly their refusal to allow drawing from nude models), in 1920 she persuaded her friends Nancy Finch and Helen Kearns to enroll with her at Columbia University in New York City, where she continued her studies in a more open-minded environment. Her mother, Effie Merrill, accompanied the young women as a chaperone and was herself a student along with them.
Merrill showed considerable talent for the figure and for fashion illustration. She was soon employed by Bergdorf-Goodman in Manhattan as an artist, and after her marriage to Leslie Van Frank in 1922 and their subsequent move up the Hudson River to Newburgh, she continued to work as a freelance fashion illustrator for various firms in New York.
With a new last name, she was able to ignore the name “Edna,” which she disliked, and more often signed her name E. Merrill Van Frank, or Merrill Van Frank, and her family and friends generally called her Merrill.
Among Merrill and Leslie’s friends as they raised their family were expatriate Utah artists Mahonri Young and Herman Palmer, who occasionally offered advice to the young artist as she began to produce paintings, first in watercolor and later in oils. While continuing the fashion work, Merrill labored to develop her fine art talents, beginning a lifelong effort to become a saleable painter, an effort that was unfortunately doomed to failure. Strong in drawing, anatomy, and composition, but only “average” as a colorist and in painting, she seems never to have found the guidance she needed in order to discover a direction and philosophy of art.
Van Frank was able to exhibit locally and in Manhattan, represented by 10 to 20 works every couple of years during the 1930s in shows of the Central Valley Art Association. She also had a solo show at a Manhattan gallery whose name is lost to time and exhibited at least one painting in an Associated American Artists show in Manhattan in 1941.
With her children Roger and Connie grown, Merrill returned with Leslie to live in Utah in 1943. Well before this move, Western landscapes and other Western subjects had begun appearing in her work. While she returned to certain “Eastern” themes throughout the rest of her career, Western and, particularly, Utah subject matter – both historical and contemporary – was more and more her concern in painting and drawing. She worked for Auerbach’s department store in Salt Lake City as an artist from 1945 to 1950. For the store, she executed a number of large historical murals commemorating the Utah Centennial in 1947, most of which have been lost. A few were returned to Merrill and hung in the Pioneer Craft House to aid her teaching. Others were donated to the collections of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum in Salt Lake City (and are now lost).
In 1950, Merrill went to work for the ZCMI department store in Salt Lake City, where she also produced a number of murals about costume history to decorate the store. ZCMI also exhibited and sold her work several times during the 1950s. She worked in the store’s fashion department at first, but by about 1956 she became an interior designer for them, and she later worked with independent designer Sharon Mulholland until she “retired” in 1973.
In the last decade of her life, Merrill continued her important association with the Pioneer Craft House as a teacher and frequent exhibitor, and she devoted her considerable energies and still-growing talent to painting. It was during this time that she produced some of her most fully realized and important work. She died in 1985, after a life rich in friends and experience, but without having found the wide audience for her art that her best work shows she deserved.
Learn more about Merrill Van Frank and her work on our collection website.
Top image: “Brigham Street”
