Frank McClure had one of those careers that resists being reduced to a single title. During the working week, he was a biochemist whose research helped advance the scientific understanding of fluoride and dental health. Away from the laboratory, he was a printmaker and artist who transformed flowers, winter streets, railroad stations, markets, landscapes, animals, and ordinary moments of American life into bold graphic images.
Born on December 30, 1896, in Lafayette, Indiana, Frank James McClure pursued science and art side by side for much of his life. His professional scientific career eventually took him to the National Institutes of Health, where he became associated with some of the early research behind water fluoridation. His artistic work followed a different path, moving through woodcuts, linoleum cuts, ink drawings, watercolor, and other graphic media.
The two careers may appear unrelated, but they reveal a similar kind of attention. Scientific research required observation, patience, precision, and an interest in structure. Printmaking demanded many of the same qualities. Whether McClure was studying chemistry or carving an image into a block, he was looking closely at how things worked.
๐งช From Indiana to Biochemistry
McClure was born in Lafayette, Indiana, and remained closely connected with Purdue University during the early years of his education. He earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biochemistry at Purdue before continuing his studies at the University of Illinois, where he received his doctorate.
His scientific career included teaching positions at Purdue, Pennsylvania State College, and Texas A&M before he moved into federal research. In 1936, McClure joined the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, beginning a three-decade association with the federal biomedical research community.
The work eventually placed him within the National Institute of Dental Research, where he became chief of its Laboratory of Biochemistry. By the time he retired in 1966, McClure had become closely associated with research into fluoride and its relationship to tooth decay.
His name therefore belongs not only in the history of American printmaking but also in the history of public-health research.
๐ฆท Researching Fluoride and Dental Health
McClure’s scientific reputation grew through his investigations into the biological effects of fluoride. During the middle decades of the 20th century, researchers were attempting to understand why communities with naturally occurring fluoride in their water often experienced lower rates of dental cavities.
The question eventually became part of one of the major public-health developments of the era: the introduction of controlled fluoride levels into public water systems to help reduce tooth decay. McClure was among the scientists whose research contributed to the scientific foundation behind that effort.
Former NIH scientist Alan Peterkofsky later remembered McClure as a highly respected researcher with an established reputation for early work demonstrating the benefits of fluoride in protecting teeth. McClure’s laboratory career thus placed him at the intersection of biochemistry, dentistry, nutrition, and preventive public health.
The work could hardly seem farther removed from carving a linoleum block, but McClure never treated science and art as mutually exclusive lives.
๐ Water Fluoridation: The Search and the Victory
After retiring from the National Institute of Dental Research in 1966, McClure continued reflecting on the scientific developments he had witnessed. He wrote Water Fluoridation: The Search and the Victory, an account of the research and public-health effort that led to fluoridation becoming widely used as a strategy for reducing dental caries.
The subject had become controversial in American public life, making the historical and scientific record particularly important. McClure had been close enough to the research to understand both the experimental work and the broader process through which scientific findings entered public policy.
His contributions brought professional recognition. In 1969, the International Association for Dental Research honored him for his work related to fluoridation, and he also received the Superior Service Award of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Yet while colleagues knew McClure as a scientist, another community knew him through prints and drawings.
๐จ The Other Frank McClure
McClure’s artistic career is easy to overlook because science was his principal profession. The Smithsonian American Art Museum, however, preserves extensive evidence that art was far more than an occasional hobby.
He created woodcuts, linoleum cuts, ink drawings, watercolors, and other works on paper. Some depict flowers or still-life arrangements, while others focus on city streets, railroads, farms, landscapes, winter scenes, markets, animals, and groups of people.
This range immediately complicates the idea that McClure had one single signature subject. He appears instead to have been fascinated by the visual possibilities of everyday life.
A row of flowers could become a pattern.
A bus stop in winter could become a study in figures and weather.
Railroad tracks could pull the eye toward a distant horizon.
A market could become a dense arrangement of signs, buildings, and people.
McClure kept finding subjects close at hand.
๐ค Why Printmaking?
Printmaking suited McClure’s visual instincts particularly well.
In a woodcut or linoleum cut, the artist typically removes portions of a block so that the remaining raised surface carries the ink. The image therefore emerges through decisions about positive and negative space. Black and white must work together, and the artist must think carefully about which areas should remain and which should disappear.
The technique naturally encourages strong shapes and simplified forms. Details can be retained, but every mark has to contribute.
That disciplined process seems especially appropriate for someone trained as a scientist. Printmaking rewards planning and precision, but it also permits expressive carving, unexpected textures, irregular edges, and bold simplification.
McClure’s prints often balance these qualities. They are descriptive enough that the subject remains immediately recognizable, yet graphic enough that lines, masses, shadows, and patterns become important in their own right.
๐ป Flowers as Graphic Design
Flowers became one recurring subject in McClure’s work.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum owns his 1967 woodcut Sun Flowers, as well as Flowers in a Window, a 1964 linoleum cut. Other works in the museum’s collection include tulips and additional floral arrangements.
Flowers are particularly suited to relief printmaking because their structures can be simplified into strong silhouettes. Petals form repeating shapes, stems create directional lines, and leaves provide areas of contrast that can be arranged almost like pieces of graphic design.
In Flowers in a Window, the subject is domestic and familiar, yet the printmaking process transforms the arrangement into something more formal. The window, container, flowers, and surrounding shapes create an organized visual structure in which everyday objects become part of a larger pattern.
McClure’s floral subjects demonstrate that an artist does not need an exotic or dramatic subject to make an engaging print. The transformation can happen through the way the artist sees.
๐ท Tulips and the Beauty of Ordinary Subjects
Tulips appear repeatedly in McClure’s surviving work, including ink and watercolor images preserved by the Smithsonian.
The attraction is easy to understand. Tulips contain simple shapes that remain recognizable even after considerable visual reduction. A curved flower head, narrow stem, and broad leaves can become a compact vocabulary of lines and forms.
McClure’s treatment of flowers also places him within a long tradition of artists finding serious visual problems in apparently modest subjects. Still-life painting had done the same thing for centuries. Modern printmakers continued that tradition while using different materials and graphic languages.
The subject might be a vase of flowers rather than a heroic landscape, but the artistic questions remained substantial. How should the forms be arranged? Where should the darkest area fall? How much detail is necessary? What can be removed without losing the subject?
McClure’s prints reveal an artist interested in those decisions.
โ๏ธ Winter Streets
Some of McClure’s most evocative subjects involve winter.
The Smithsonian holds multiple works titled Bus Stop, as well as Snow and Winter Day. These images turn seasonal weather into a way of reorganizing familiar places.
Snow simplifies a landscape visually. Roads, fences, roofs, and trees become dark lines against pale ground, while people stand out sharply against the surrounding environment.
For a printmaker, these conditions provide almost ideal material.
Winter naturally reduces color and emphasizes contrast, producing a world that already resembles a black-and-white print before the artist begins working.
McClure’s interest in snow scenes also places ordinary human activity within a larger environment. People wait for transportation, move through streets, or encounter a landscape transformed temporarily by weather.
Nothing monumental needs to happen.
The atmosphere is enough.
๐ Bus Stop
McClure returned more than once to the subject of people waiting for a bus.
The idea may sound almost deliberately uneventful, but that is precisely what makes it interesting.
A bus stop brings unrelated individuals together temporarily. Everyone occupies the same physical space while waiting for something that has not yet arrived. Bodies lean, stand, turn, or cluster according to weather and circumstance.
In McClure’s winter versions, the snow strengthens the graphic possibilities. Dark clothing and figures contrast with pale streets, while the waiting group provides a human center within the composition.
These images capture something that photographers and artists have long found compelling about cities: strangers constantly form temporary communities.
For a few minutes, everyone at the stop shares the same destination point.
Then the bus arrives and the arrangement disappears.
๐ Railroads and Going West
Transportation appears elsewhere in McClure’s work, including the drawing Going West and the print Waiting for the Local.
Railroads carry enormous visual and cultural associations within American art. Tracks produce dramatic perspective, locomotives suggest movement and industrial power, and stations function as places of arrival, departure, anticipation, and separation.
For an artist born at the end of the 19th century, trains would also have been part of the ordinary machinery of American life rather than nostalgic symbols of an earlier era.
McClure’s treatment of railroad subjects fits naturally beside his interest in bus stops, roads, towns, and markets. He repeatedly turned toward places where people and systems intersected.
His America was not composed only of scenic wilderness.
It was also waiting rooms, streets, trains, farms, telephone poles, shops, and the structures people built to move through everyday life.
๐ฝ Rural America
McClure’s art also includes farms and agricultural subjects.
Works such as Corn Stacks show his interest in rural landscapes, while other surviving images depict rivers, fields, trees, and roads.
Again, the attraction appears partly structural. Agricultural landscapes provide patterns created both by nature and human activity. Crops form rows, fences divide space, roads lead across fields, and barns create strong geometric interruptions within softer natural surroundings.
The resulting images belong comfortably within a broader American printmaking tradition in which artists used woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, and linoleum cuts to represent regional life.
McClure’s scenes do not need to make grand statements about America in order to contribute to that tradition.
Their value often lies in observation.
They preserve the appearance of ordinary places.
๐ Markets and Everyday Commerce
A woodcut titled Market with Cafe Sign demonstrates McClure’s interest in another form of everyday environment.
Markets are visually busy places. Signs compete for attention, buildings frame the activity, merchandise creates irregular shapes, and groups of people continuously rearrange themselves.
A printmaker has to decide how much of that complexity to preserve.
Too much information can overwhelm a small print, while too little can remove the energy that makes a market distinctive.
McClure’s work repeatedly shows an interest in that balance. He simplifies enough to establish visual clarity while retaining enough detail for a strong sense of place.
The result is not an idealized America emptied of activity.
People remain part of the picture.
๐ช From Markets to Circuses
McClure’s subject matter could also become playful.
His print Circus Pals includes elephants and zebras within a circus environment, demonstrating that his visual interests extended beyond landscapes and still life.
Animals create particularly interesting challenges for printmakers because recognizable movement and anatomy need to be suggested economically. Stripes, outlines, silhouettes, and repeated textures can carry much of the visual information.
The circus also belongs naturally within the broader world McClure documented. Like stations and markets, it is a place of gathering, movement, signs, spectacle, and temporary arrangements.
His subject matter may therefore be more unified than it initially appears.
McClure was repeatedly drawn toward things observed in lived environments rather than invented fantasy worlds.
๐ฆ Animals and Nature
Other works extend his interest in animals more quietly. The Smithsonian collection includes an ink work titled Owls, showing that wildlife could become a subject outside the spectacle of the circus.
Owls offer a different visual language from flowers, railroads, or crowded streets. Their round eyes, feather patterns, compact bodies, and placement among trees lend themselves to strong graphic treatment.
McClure’s movement among such varied subjects suggests that he did not define himself narrowly through a specialized artistic program.
He looked.
Something caught his attention.
Then he found a way to translate it into marks.
That openness may help explain the breadth of the surviving collection.
๐ Figures and Faces
McClure also created images centered on individual figures.
One particularly striking example is his 1969 linoleum cut Untitled (Woman Wearing Plumes), which focuses on a female figure wearing an elaborate hat decorated with feathers.
The subject allows him to turn clothing into graphic form. The plumes become sweeping shapes, while the simplified portrait balances recognizable features against the strong black-and-white language of the linocut.
Portrait-like works such as this demonstrate that McClure was not confined to landscape observation.
The human figure could become another field in which contour, pattern, and contrast mattered.
A face required enough detail to remain individual while still functioning within the simplified structure of the print.
โ๏ธ Linoleum Cut, Woodcut and Ink
The older Comet Atomic article describes linocut ink as McClure’s medium of choice, but his surviving body of work was broader than that description suggests.
Smithsonian records identify linoleum cuts, woodcuts, ink drawings, watercolors, and other graphic works.
This variety is important because each medium behaves differently.
A linoleum block allows smoother carving than many woods and can encourage flowing curves and broad clean shapes. Wood carries its own resistance and physical character, often producing a slightly different visual texture. Ink drawing places the mark directly on paper without the intermediate carving and printing process, while watercolor introduces transparency and color.
Moving among these media allowed McClure to adjust his technique according to the subject rather than forcing every image through exactly the same process.
๐ผ๏ธ An Artist With a Scientific Career
The coexistence of art and science is perhaps the most fascinating part of McClure’s story.
Modern culture often treats them as opposites. Science is supposed to be analytical while art is supposed to be intuitive. Science studies facts while art explores feelings.
Actual creative lives are usually more complicated.
Both disciplines require sustained attention. Both involve experiments. Both ask people to notice relationships that others overlook. Both depend on technique developed through repetition, and both can involve periods in which the outcome is uncertain.
McClure did not need to choose one identity and erase the other.
For decades, laboratory work and art existed within the same life.
๐๏ธ Becoming a Collector
McClure’s relationship with art extended beyond his own work.
He assembled a substantial collection of prints and drawings by other 20th-century artists, demonstrating that he was not merely someone who made art privately after work. He followed printmaking seriously enough to collect it.
His collection included works by artists such as Grace Albee, Peggy Bacon, Paul Cadmus, John Steuart Curry, Childe Hassam, Peter Hurd, Rockwell Kent, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Raphael Soyer, Stow Wengenroth, and others.
This breadth reveals considerable curiosity.
Different printmaking traditions, regional styles, subjects, and techniques could coexist within the same collection.
McClure was participating in print culture as artist, viewer, and collector.
๐๏ธ The Smithsonian Bequest
When McClure died in Washington, D.C., in 1979, his relationship with American art institutions did not end.
His bequest to what was then the National Museum of American Art became significant enough that the museum organized the 1981 exhibition An American Perspective: Selections from the Bequest of Frank McClure.
The exhibition presented 66 prints and drawings by 20th-century artists from McClure’s collection.
That title, An American Perspective, is especially fitting.
McClure’s own art repeatedly looked at ordinary American environments, while the collection he built brought together many different interpretations of American life and modern printmaking.
His legacy therefore entered the museum in two ways: through the things he created and through the things he valued enough to preserve.
๐ง Looking Closely
The strongest connection between McClure’s scientific and artistic lives may simply be observation.
A scientist examining a biological process learns not to assume that the obvious explanation is necessarily correct. Small differences matter.
An artist learns something similar.
A row of tulips is not merely a row of tulips once you begin studying its shapes. Snow is not simply white when fences, branches, people, and shadows cross it. A bus stop is not visually empty just because nothing dramatic is happening.
McClure’s art repeatedly finds interest in situations that could easily be ignored.
That makes the work quietly modern.
It asks viewers to look at everyday surroundings with greater care.
๐ฐ๏ธ Art Outside the Traditional Art Career
McClure’s life is also a useful reminder that not every significant body of artwork is produced by someone whose biography follows the conventional path of art school, galleries, teaching positions, and full-time studio practice.
His primary professional identity belonged to science.
Yet he kept making prints.
The distinction matters because histories of art often become histories of professional art careers. People who maintained other occupations can disappear from those narratives even when their work entered important collections.
McClure complicates that model.
His life suggests that artistic seriousness is not measured solely by whether art provided someone’s paycheck.
The work itself still matters.
๐ฌ Science, Art and Mid-Century America
McClure’s dual career also makes him an especially interesting figure within the broader history of mid-20th-century America.
This was an era of enormous confidence in scientific research. Federal institutions expanded, medicine advanced rapidly, chemistry transformed consumer products and industry, and public-health initiatives attempted to use scientific discoveries to improve everyday life.
At the same time, printmaking remained an accessible and vibrant artistic medium. Artists created images of cities, farms, workers, transportation, landscapes, and ordinary domestic life while museums increasingly recognized works on paper as an important part of American art.
McClure inhabited both worlds.
His laboratory work belonged to the scientific optimism of the period, while his prints recorded the visual world in which those changes were taking place.
โ๏ธ Frank McClure in the Comet Atomic Universe
Frank McClure belongs naturally at Comet Atomic because his life connects several subjects that rarely appear together.
There is mid-century science and public health, along with federal research at the NIH. There is traditional printmaking, with woodcuts and linoleum cuts built through physical craft rather than modern technology. There are images of railroads, winter streets, markets, farms, plants, and ordinary American life.
His story also expands the site’s definition of a creative person.
Not every artist spent a lifetime inside the art world.
McClure could spend the day studying biochemical questions and still return to an entirely different form of inquiry through drawing and printmaking.
Both required curiosity.
โจ Why Frank McClure Still Matters
Frank McClure died in Washington, D.C., in March 1979 at the age of 82, leaving behind achievements that belonged to two very different histories.
In science, he contributed to research that helped establish the role of fluoride in preventing tooth decay and became part of the history of one of the 20th century’s major public-health measures.
In art, he left prints and drawings that captured flowers, people, transportation, animals, markets, landscapes, snow, and everyday scenes with an observant graphic eye. He also assembled a collection of American prints significant enough to become part of the Smithsonian’s holdings and the basis of a museum exhibition.
Neither career needs to be treated as a footnote to the other.
Together they make McClure far more interesting.
He spent his life examining the world at different scales, from biochemical processes invisible to the naked eye to tulips standing in a window and people waiting beside a snowy road.
Science gave him one way of looking closely.
Art gave him another.
Frank McClure found room for both.
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๐ Sources & Further Reading
- Smithsonian American Art Museum โ Frank McClure
- Smithsonian Institution โ An American Perspective: Selections from the Bequest of Frank McClure
- Smithsonian American Art Museum โ Flowers in a Window
- Smithsonian American Art Museum โ Sun Flowers
- Smithsonian American Art Museum โ Untitled (Woman Wearing Plumes)
- Smithsonian American Art Museum โ Bus Stop
- Smithsonian Institution โ Going West
- Smithsonian Institution โ Corn Stacks
- NIH Office of History โ Alan Peterkofsky Oral History
- The Washington Post โ Frank McClure, 82, Biochemist Did Early Studies of Fluorides
