Résumé

Free-lance furniture designer, Los Angeles, CA. In the 1940s, Frankl designed furniture for private interior design clients, marketed pieces marketed through his Beverly Hills Frankl Galleries, and produced mass-market designs most notably for the Brown-Saltman Company of Los Angeles and the Johnson Furniture Company of Grand Rapids, MI.

Teaching

Instructor, University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA.

Instructor, Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, CA

College

Dipl. Architecture, Königlich Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg, Berlin, Germany, c. 1906.

Relocation

Born in Vienna, Austria, Paul T. Frankl attended design school at the Königlich Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg, what became the Technische Hochschule of Berlin in 1920. After graduation, Frankl traveled in Europe before coming to New York, NY, in 04/1914. Initially working as an architect, Frankl turned increasingly to interior and furniture design during the 1920s, developing a style strongly influenced by skyscraper and Art Deco imagery. His Frankl Gallery in New York featured his own brand, Skyscraper Furniture, that became highly sought after by the city's intelligentsia during the decade.

During the Depression's depths, in 1934, Frankl relocated to Los Angeles, the film capital, where building and interior design projects continued to be commissioned. At this bleak time, some out-of-work designers also found jobs designing furniture or sets used in motion pictures.. Frankl knew Cedric Gibbons (1893-1960), the interior designer who worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the 1930s, for whom Frankl produced furniture used on film sets. (See Christopher Long, "Becoming American: Paul T. Frankl's Passage to a New Design Aesthetic," in Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture, Alison Clarke and Elana Shapria, eds., [London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017], p. 88.) He opened another location of Frankl Galleries on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, creating an elite client base of movie stars, socialites and entertainment industry executives.