Alfred Frank

Alfred Frank (28 May 1884 – 12 January 1945) was a German painter, sculptor, lithographer and communist. Alfred Frank was the son of a gardener. He first completed an apprenticeship as a lithographer and joined the SPD in Leipzig in 1906. From 1906 to 1908 and from 1910 to 1912 he attended the evening school of the Royal Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Trades and became a portrait and landscape painter, but also worked as a printmaker. After returning from the First World War, he joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1919 and designed posters and banners for the party and from 1923 and worked as a press illustrator for the communist Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung. From 1925 he taught at the Leipzig adult education center. In 1928 Frank joined the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists (ASSO), of which he became the Leipzig representative. He also worked as a teacher at the Marxist Workers' School. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Frank was dismissed from the adult education center and taken into protective custody until the autumn, then sentenced to a year in prison in 1934. In 1935/36 he founded a resistance group together with other intellectuals, which at the beginning of the Second World War, joined the resistance group around Georg Schumann and Kurt Kresse.