The Grimms’ stories weren’t widely illustrated, or popular, until after they were cleaned up by their other brother Ludwig, and the English lawyer Edgar Taylor, who did things like make it so that the queen in Snow White chokes on her own envy, rather than dance in heated iron shoes until she dies, as the Grimms had it.Ĭonsequently, Frank’s Cinderella is far from Disney. What we see in movies, the sanitized versions, is not the way the world is.
“I find them really elegant and funny and representative of real life at the time–that’s, I think, the biggest key. “I don’t find the stories grotesque,” Frank said. rapunzel) giving birth to a baby with golden hair already in long strands, the shape falling into a pair of scissors at one point, the sorceress who kidnaps her standing in the background, topless. Take for example her “Rapunzel,” which features an opening drawing of a lettuce munching woman (in the Grimm version Rapunzel’s mother is obsessed with valerianella locusta a.k.a. Frank’s paintings always tend to have a narrative feel to them anyway–the experience akin to reading some kind of meticulous and elegant horror comic book, with the panels stacked on top of each other, Bacon’s popes meet Guernica–but here every page dances with color and emotion. “But then I was so taken with the stories, I just found them charming and elegant but dangerous and funny at the same time, so I started to draw them seriously.”įrank worked from the Jack Zipes translations of the tales, which appear alongside her drawings, and Zipes, in his introduction to her book, strives to tell readers “just how close she is to the Grimms” and their tales of “child abuse, incest, rape, fierce sibling rivalry, animal brutalization, rebellion, fratricide, and other issues that were problematic in the lives of the people in their time.”Īnd that’s only the short list. “I started drawing them for fun,” Frank said, of how she came to the book, having not read it in childhood but discovering it on a trip to Paula Rego’s studio in 2011.
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