Mark Tobey

About the Photographer

Frasnay, Daniel

French, b. 1928

Daniel Frasnay was born in Paris in 1928. He began his career in photography by working under portraitist Roger Carlet and later at Studio Lipnitski in Paris. In the early 1950s, Frasnay started working on a freelance basis and soon established himself as a photojournalist, working on assignment for a number of agencies and international publications. Around the same time, Frasnay also began to photograph the cabaret scene in Paris, which he continued to document for several decades as the official photographer of the Lido, Carrousel, and Folie-Bergère in Paris. Frasnay befriended many of the leading artists of the twentieth century and photographed each of them in their respective studios. In 1969, he published the book, The Artist's World, which features photographs of forty artists, accompanied by interviews. The series is represented in the MoCP's collection in a 1960 photograph of Mark Tobey, an American Abstract Expressionist painter. Among the other artists represented in the book are George Braque, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Sonia Delaunay, William de Kooning, René Magritte, and Joan Miro. In addition to The Artist’s World, Frasnay’s numerous publications include Paris la nuit (1956), Paris Parade (1999), and Les Girls (2005). Frasnay was the subject of a documentary film entitled Daniel Frasnay, le royaume et l’exil (2005).