Frenk Uitford

Frank Whitford was an illustrator, art historian, critic, and one of the leading British experts on German and Austrian art of the 20th century.

He was born into the family of Peter Whitford and his wife, Catherine Ellen (née Rowe). He was educated at Peter Symonds School in Winchester and studied at Wadham College, Oxford, graduating with honors in English language and literature in 1963, because he preferred drawing to his studies. A self-taught artist, he drew posters, worked as an actor in student films, and illustrated student magazines.

He later studied German art at the Courtauld Institute, receiving a diploma in art history in 1965. He worked as a cartoonist and illustrator at the Sunday Mirror in 1965–66 before switching to pocket cartoons for the Evening Standard in 1966–67. Richard J. Evans, in his obituary for The Guardian (23 January 2014), quoted Whitford as saying: “For nearly four years or so I was churning out pocket cartoons almost daily, trying to be funny and politically acute at the same time. I seldom, if ever, succeeded, which explains why my career was such a short one, only briefly prolonged by a change of newspapers and editors halfway through.”

With a Ford Foundation scholarship, Whitford entered the Free University of Berlin, earning a diploma in art history in 1969. The following year he began lecturing in art history at University College London before becoming a senior lecturer at Homerton College, Cambridge, in 1974. When the Department of Art History was closed in 1986, Whitford began working as a freelance and teaching art history at the Royal College of Art; he was awarded the highest doctorate by the RCA in 1989.

Whitford also worked as a television presenter, appearing as a team captain on Channel 4’s game-show gallery in the 1980s, presenting two series on cartoonists on Radio 4 in the early 1990s, and writing and presenting the documentary video Bauhaus: The Face of the 20th Century (1994).

In 2002 he was awarded the Federal Cross of the Order of Merit in Germany.