Frank Magnus-Hirshfield

Hirshfield Frank, b.1931 British AR.

Frank Hirshfield is an amazing man, world champion at wrestling combined with a long and distinguished career as a sculptor. He started by joining Fanaroff, the great art metal worker in the 1950s. He attributes his long and successful career and international recognition to this training, as opposed to a traditional art school.

His first commercial success was in creating figurative gold mini sculptures for showing at Lacloche in Cannes c. 1957, and in 1958 he exhibited his sculpture studies in the back room of the Galerie 65, Cannes, the front rooms showed Lorjou and the sketch books of Modigliani. After moving to Paris, Frank decided to visit England, where he became cellar manager of the famous Mayfair wine firm of Block Grey and Block, later becoming the Director of their Highland Malt Distillery. All the while he spent evenings creating and casting his own smaller sculptures finding time to be commended three times by De Beers for his precious metal designs.

It is an enigma to himself how he found time to win the British Light Welterweight wrestling titles and Gold Medal in the 1966 World Games. As a corollary to those achievements, the president of the Olympic Committee for Wrestling owns one of his unique bronze wrestlers. He quickly was offered exhibitions in Paris, the U.S. and Israel, the inaugural show at the State Arts and Crafts Centre MASKIT.

His last exhibitions were at the Galerie Silverpoint, Paris and at Avignon, where it all began. He reflects that in the last twenty years he has been fortunate to be able to count on private collectors of his work, which explains why so little of his work reaches the market. The auction is a great opportunity for discerning collectors of sculptures to buy one of Frank's unique individual works; each sculpture is a one off, there are no copies.