“I f I were to do a series of portraits on one famous person in history,” mused Sanibel Island artist Myra Roberts one day in February of 2010, after reading an art story in the Wall Street Journal, “who would it be?”
The answer came at once: Anne Frank.
Taking on such a project would be a radical departure from her work of the last decade. Since moving to Southwest Florida in 1999 from Chicago, Myra had made a name for herself in art circles for her airy and light-hearted vintage-style portraits of bathing beauties and tropical beach scenes.
Yet, as much as she enjoyed creating these sun-drenched portraits of coquettish pin-ups, she had often thought of taking on a subject more serious in character. “Social equality and tolerance are very important to me,” she said. “I wanted to do something very powerful, raw and honest. In the life of Anne Frank there was light and dark, a beauty and horrific power, a yin and yang. The more I read about Anne, the more intrigued I was by this insightful and lovely young girl.”
The reason Anne Frank came into her mind was her father, Ben Weingrowski, who fled Poland before the Nazi occupation. Many of his uncles, aunts and cousins perished during World War II.
That autumn, her husband, sculptor Wes Roberts, surprised her by making Amsterdam the entry point of a six-week tour of Europe. Their first morning, they went on foot to the Anne Frank House. “What amazed me was to see people standing in line around the building, people from all over the world, I had no idea it was so popular,” said Myra.
Together she and Wes saw the jam equipment of Otto Frank, Anne’s father, and traversed the labyrinth of corridors and hallways until they came to the bookcase, still in place, that led to the Frank family’s secret hiding place in the annex. 
“It is a very large house, impossibly tall, with all these tiny doors,” recalls Wes. “When you get to the bookcase, you think, ‘My God, does this keep going?’ We walked up the stairs, and came into the attic where there were still posters of Hollywood stars like Greta Garbo and you could see the handwriting of Anne Frank on the walls.”
“When we reached the attic,” said Myra, “I thought, Is this ever dim. It was so dark, I wanted sunlight right away. It’s incredible to think of a whole family of seven people living up there for two years, and only occasionally looking out a window or getting fresh air. Seeing the Hollywood posters made me think about when I was a little girl and having posters on the wall, the same way Anne did.”
When Myra returned to Sanibel, the new feelings she had about Anne took expression as charcoal sketches and then oil paintings. They alternated between scenes of Anne as an innocent young girl with scenes of her behind barbed wire or facing a Nazi soldier. 
“Going into the Anne Frank House changed how I felt about her because her fate becomes real, not just a story out of a book,” said Myra. “I felt encouraged by her spirit as I continued with the paintings, like I was channeling her into the art.”
Soon the floodgates were open, and Myra immersed herself into the life of Anne Frank and stories of the Holocaust. She studied photos, read other World War II diaries, and became familiar with the propaganda and cartoons of the time.
And she painted. And painted. She started with the idea of a series of 20 portraits of Anne during different periods of her life. But when she finished No. 20 she realized she was not done. Fresh ideas for compositions of Anne came to her. Anne with her sister at the seashore. Anne with her father, Otto, with a narrative subtext containing the Nazi regulations prohibiting Jews from riding bikes. Anne as a baby. Anne as a journalist. Anne imagining herself in a boxcar. Anne looking out of the attic at the chestnut tree. 
The Anne Frank series has already been in quite a range of venues. The paintings have been on exhibit at the Beth El Synagogue and Edison Community College in Fort Myers, the Holocaust Museum of Southwest Florida in Naples, BIG ARTS and The Sanibel Public Library on Sanibel Island. The images have been collected into an art catalogue, “Project Tolerance: The Faces of Anne Frank,” available on her Web site, www.Myra Roberts.com. The project has brought her into contact with a number of extraordinary people, including Holocaust survivors such as Cesare Frustaci, who lives in Southwest Florida and has told his story at a number of the artist’s presentations. The Anne Frank series has touched a chord in the community, and her exhibits have proved cathartic for scores of individuals.
The Anne Frank paintings have even attracted the notice of the former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. One July morning in 2012 Myra went to her mailbox and found a note signed by Hillary. “Dear Myra,” it said, on clean white stationary, “Your artwork is very moving, and I am grateful to you for undertaking this effort to promote tolerance by sharing the story of Anne Frank. Please know I appreciate your support and send you my best wishes for continued success with your work.”
Myra has followed up her portraits of Anne Frank with portraits of other young girls who have also become enshrined as heros by the international community for their courage, grace and dignity in the face of violence.
At the end of 2012 she painted Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani student who was shot in the head but declared, even as she recuperated from surgery in Great Britain that she would continue to defend the right of girls to go to school.
Roberts then followed up with Jyoti Singh Pandey, the lovely young Indian medical student who was raped and murdered on a bus. Beside her portrait, which radiates a face of innocence and the lavish colors of Indian traditional dress, is a quote by Einstein: “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”
Currently she is sketching out an image of the talented African-American girl, Hadiya Pendleton, known to her family as “the walking angel,” who performed at President Obama’s inauguration and was shot and killed in Chicago days later.
“These girls are this generation’s Anne Frank,” notes Myra Roberts. She wishes to honor them too. Anne’s message is one of tolerance and peace. It is a message now stamped, in addition to her diary, on over 40 Myra Roberts oil canvasses.

(Project Tolerance will be on view at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersberg from May-July).
“ The Anne Frank Series comprised of 30 original paintings of Anne Frank and a book of the paintings will be exhibited across the country, starting with Big Arts and Sanibel Public Library, Sedona Arizona Art Center. Cab Calloway School of the Arts in Delaware and will be on view at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg. This project has been endorsed by
Hillary Clinton, our former Secretary of State and Jane Goodall, world renown anthropologist. The purpose of this project is to promote peace, equality and brotherly love… to understand and learn from the past to create a better future. Anna is a worldwide symbol of innocence lost.”
– Myra Roberts

One Comment