Frank was a Surrealist at the movement’s most innovative and radical phase, yet she focused her art on a concoction of explicit erotic imagery and Jewish iconography disagreeable to most Surrealists. She highlighted her Jewish identity on the event of European Jewry’s worst horrors and near-annihilation, yet she seemed intent to depict Judaism by intentionally employing imagery culled from the entire genealogy of Western Anti-Semitism; she derided Zionism, but immigrated to Tel Aviv. Ambivalence is Frank’s second nature-but maybe this contrary stance can also be experienced as one of multiplicity, imagination and humor, not necessarily leading to “blindness,” “ignorance” and “forgetting,” as Rosen asserts. Perhaps today this condition of plurality and unresolved inner-tension can be experienced with a gay sense of relief, as a form of liberation.

What are we to make of Frank today? We experience her comic shuffling of notions and tropes of masculinity and femininity in relation to several scenes of historic fathers: the fathers of French transgressive art and smut, the constituting fathers of Zionism, and the authoritative European fathers who forged compelling apparitions of ‘the Jew.’ In this sense, resurrecting Frank is not unlike deciding to adopt her as an alternative mother to these fathers, a mother whose art and life shed light on what is absent and repressed in their scenes. She is, in any case, a mother-witch, conjuring uncanny, obscene specters of the Jew.

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