Giant rocks, a daredevil teenager, and a forgotten St. Louis artist
A story hidden inside a series of dreamlike black-and-white snapshots.
Where it not for the scalloped edges, this image could easily pass for a still from a 1950s art house movie. Maybe a rural version of Little Fugitive. Or a Welsh movie where the little girl in the tulip jumper wanders amongst elephantine boulders to the edge of a quarry lake, then talks to the ghosts of her hard-bit miner ancestors. Or a cinema verite doc where the audience sympathetically spends a long, hot, dull afternoon in following a family in real time as they look at giant rocks, because they can’t afford movie tickets.
The captions penciled on the back of these photos, taken in mid-August, 1959, never include the name of the “daredevil boy” above. They do reveal the pictures were taken in Graniteville, Missouri, a town full of quarries, including the ones that supplied the stone blocks that made St. Louis’ downtown streets nearly indestructible, replacing (as the Post described it) “an almost impassable morass…of rotten and easily pulverized limestone.”
The cast of characters includes first-name-only Ken, Janet, Donna, Brenda, and Mary Ann, and last-name-only “Frenzel.”
That would be Milton Frenzel, the dark-haired man in the white T-shirt in the photos above and below.
The snapshots from this long-ago summer outing are part of the Milton and Viginia Frenzel Photographic Collection at the Missouri History Museum. They’re historically significant because of Milton’s art career — specifically, his design work with Emil Frei Stained Glass Company during the mid-20th century.
Frenzel worked under Frei the first’s son, Emil Jr., and alongside Robert Harmon, Joan Cresswell Velligan, Charles Eames, Siegfried Reinhardt and Russell Kraus. That crew of artists is considered one of the most significant in the company’s history; under Emil Jr.’s direction, they shifted from traditional Bavarian Pictorial stained glass to Modernist designs, developing the epoxy resin that’s now used all over the world for abstract, faceted stained glass. You can see their work in churches all over the United States and Canada. If you’re in St. Louis and you’re the sort of person who sets foot in churches, you’ve likely seen Frenzel’s work, including inside Kirkwood’s St. Peter Church and St. Martin of Tours in Lemay.
It’s not surprising that an artist choosing to design church windows for a living would go to church — Frenzel, like a lot of his German immigrant neighbors, was a Lutheran. What’s interesting about him was how certain life experiences impacted his faith — and the way he drew, painted, and designed stained glass.
When he was a very young man, Frenzel lived and worked in Kosciusko, a working-class immigrant neighborhood in South St. Louis, which disappeared during the “slum clearance” frenzy of the 1960s.
During the day, Frenzel worked in a hinge factory; at night, he drew and painted. After marrying Virgina Price in 1937 and moving to the 900 block of Utah Street, Frenzel kept up that same intense pace — factory work in the day, making art at night. By 1938, the Frenzels were able to afford to spend a few months in Europe, and on their return, Milton enrolled in Washington University of Fine Arts, where he studied painting and drawing for two years, joining Frei Art Glass sometime in the early 1940s.
In 1942, the couple bought a barn in Arcadia, Mo., rehabbed it, and remained in Iron County, Missouri — near all those quarries — for the rest of their lives. Frenzel continued to work for Frei and show his paintings in St. Louis, in venues as varied as the St. Louis Art Museum, the Library’s Central Branch, Little Bohemia, and The Christian Board of of Publications’ Bethany Bookstore on Pine.
In 1948, Frenzel showed one painting in a group exhibit at Little Bohemia (which the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described as a “the riverfront establishment combining art appreciation with the dispensation of drinks.”) A description of the painting is a capsule explanation of why Frenzel’s faith, and his art, were braided together with a sense of social justice:
Milton Frenzel of Arcadia, Mo., who now designs glass windows for the Emil Frei firm, is showing a large oil based on the death of a friend and fellow-worker in a hinge factory in the depression. The resemblence of the crucified figure to Christ is inescapable.
In the museum’s holdings, you’ll find Frenzel’s delicate color preparation paintings for stained glass window portraits of Jesus and St. Rose Philippine Duchesne. But you’ll also find dozens of sketches of men at work in factories. He finds beauty in the human figure and the abstract, weird shapes of giant cogs, engines and turbines. But those simple lines also suggest how the stress of working with large-scale industrial machinery takes its toll on the human body.
They echo, just a little, the early drawings of Vincent Van Gogh, after he gave up working as a lay preacher in the coal mining regions of Belgium and decided to become an artist. “I don’t know what I can do, but I hope I shall be able to make some drawings with something human in them,” he wrote. “The path is narrow, the door is narrow, and there are few who find it.”
Frenzel, who had a deep sympathy for people’s suffering because he witnessed that suffering firsthand, found a sympathetic audience with his fellow artists. Frei, Harmon and others made their views explicit in a 1947 exhibit at The People’s Art Center in Grandel Square. One art glass piece, “Christ the Worker,” co-designed by Harmon and Frei, showed “a toiling fiture of a coal miner bent over his cart. The scene is given a modern, angualr treatment, with an exaggeration of the worker’s rugged jaw anand powerful hands.”
The Post dedicated a whole paragraph to Frenzel’s work (which sound like they may have found inspiration in Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals):
This 1943 review, also of a show at the People’s Art Center, describes Frenzel’s dedicaton to using modern imagery and Modernist compositions. It also reveals he loved natural landscapes as much as he disliked cities:
Again, there’s a little echo of Van Gogh, this time his pastoral oil paintings — crows over fields, big pillowy skies, hills and haystacks and orchards.
Happily, as these photos suggest, Frenzel didn’t lose all his teeth, collapse with sunstroke after painting plein air all afternoon, or spend his middle age starving, drinking or see-sawing between mania and depression like Van Gogh. The Frenzels had one daughter, Mary; the family went on hikes and picnics; and generally lived the kind of life suited to a place called Arcadia, AKA paradise. A fellow Iron County resident, then a young reporter, remembers attending the Great Books Club at the local library run by the Frenzels:
Milton and Virginia Frenzel, who led the book discussions, were so deeply engaged with what we read, and on such a different level than most of my college professors, that they changed the way I thought about books for good. They didn’t just study them. They looked at them as living things, argued with them, demanded more from them. And by changing the way I thought about literature, they changed the way I thought about myself. And they weren’t even trying to do that. They were just being themselves, authentically and unselfconsciously, and in doing so opened up a new way of defining myself.
Milton Frenzel died of a heart attack in 1985 at the age of 72; his daughter donated nearly 50 of his paintings to Lutheran churches and hospitals in New York City, so they were seen, rather than mothballed.
Frenzel’s not famous, like some of the artists he worked with at Frei, notably Charles Eames. He’ll never be credited with anything as world-changing as Powers of 10. But he’d probably be OK with the fact that all over North America, the sun is still shining through windows he designed, the images of holy people that look like everyday people throwing colors across the faces of actual everyday people.
I remember when as a child already accustomed to stained glass I first encountered mid-century resin art windows. The vividness of the colors and the jigsaw effect of the shard-like shapes really spoke to me although I had no idea what shards are. I’ll chock it up to being -century myself.
If I hadn’t already subscribed by now this piece would have sealed the deal.