Co-written with Claudia Cornwall and Wendy Newbold-Patterson.

Frank Molnar, who I profiled, is one of three extremely talented, but largely unknown artists-mentors, and the only one still living. He resides in Point Grey and paints vibrant, stunning nudes, one of which I’m lucky enough to own.

Frank was 20 when he fled Budapest during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Years of war, Soviet occupation and bombings had turned the city into rubble. He saw starving people and dead bodies in the street; friends would disappear overnight. Frank eventually landed in the United States where he studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1962 he headed for Vancouver. There, his refusal to compromise his work or embrace the various artistic trends of the era, kept him out of the few galleries that existed and away from the public eye.

The second in a series on the Unheralded Artists of BC, the book is filled with gorgeous reproductions of the artist’s paintings and sculpture, personal photographs and previously untold stories.

Book Reviews

Times Colonist “Frank Molnar (born 1936) is introduced as a Hungarian immigrant with a taste for voluptuous nudes, and writer Eve Lazarus lets us in on the bohemian world of a painter ‘of emotional depth and volatility’.”

“The striking nudes and vibrant still life paintings of Frank Molnar leap off the pages in this study of his work,” says the North Shore News. “The images combined with Eve Lazarus’ account and Charles van Sandwyk’s introduction provides the chance to learn about this talented painter.”

“Frank Molnar is one of three B.C. artists of the 1950s and ‘60s profiled in this richly illustrated book,” writes the Vancouver Sun. “Molnar also painted nudes, including a Leda and the swan series. At the time, Canadians couldn’t handle those paintings, he told Lazarus. ‘They think my art is disturbing for the children. They wouldn’t have it in their living room, wouldn’t have it in their home.”