Paul Frankl was born in
Prague into the
rabbinic Spira-Frankl family. From 1888 to 1896, he attended a German Gymnasium, after which he enrolled in the German Staats-Obergymnasium of Prague, graduating in 1896. He served for one year as Lieutenant in the Austrian military. In order to pursue a degree in higher education, he converted to Catholicism, a move that was not uncommon among non-Catholics during this era. He matriculated to the
Technische Hochschule München and, later, the
Technische Hochschule Berlin. He graduated with a degree in architecture in 1904. While in Berlin, Frankl fostered social relationships with philosophers and artists including fellow Pragueian
Max Wertheimer and
Käthe Kollwitz. These artists and philosophers not only introduced Frankl to new systems of thinking, such as Gestalt psychology, but also to his future wife, the artist and musician, Elsa Herzberg, who shared a studio with Käthe Kollwitz. Frankl and Herzberg eventually had five children. In 1908, Frankl left his work as an architect to study philosophy, history, and art history at the
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München under
Heinrich Wölfflin and Berthold Riehl, the founder of the
Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. Riehl supervised Frankl's doctoral dissertation on fifteenth-century glass painting in southern Germany. Frankl was heavily influenced by Wölfflin's understanding of architectural development, but did not adhere to Wölfflin's views on formalism. From 1914 to 1920, Frankl held a position as
privatdozent, which enabled him to teach at the University of Munich while contributing to the
Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft (ed. Albert Brinckmann and Fritz Burger). In 1914, Frankl wrote his first theoretical work,
Die Entwicklungsphasen der neueren Baukunst (1914).
Die Entwicklungsphasen proposes four major categories of art history analysis – spatial composition, treatment of mass and surface, treatment of optical effects, and the relation of design to social function – that Frankl continued to draw upon in his later work. Frankl held an assistant professorship at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München from 1920 to 1921, after which he became full professor at the
University of Halle. It was here that Frankl initiated his lifelong interest in medieval architecture. His study,
Die frühmittelalterliche und romanische Baukunst (1926) shows his categorical distinctions between Romanesque and Gothic architecture – the former being "additive", "frontal", and "structural" while the latter is "partial", "diagonal", and "textural". In 1933, Frankl's enthusiasm for medieval architecture led him to join a group of medievalists at the 13th International Congress of the History of Art in
Stockholm to view the only gothic church whose original wooden arch scaffolding was still extant. The Nazis terminated Frankl's position in Halle in 1934. Upon leaving the university, Frankl returned to Munich and wrote his treatise,
Das System der Kunstwissenschaft (1938), which offered a comprehensive history of art grounded in phenomenology and morphology.
Das System was issued in Czechoslovakia since Jewish authors were censored in Germany and Austria. During this time, Frankl also made a brief trip to
Constantinople. ==Transitions to the United States, 1934-1947==