[5] The Brooklyn home inspired her young artistic inclinations with colorful medallions and portraits of famous people on the library ceiling and a print of Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair on a wall.
Eventually her mother, tired from housekeeping, talked Abe into moving into two suites at the Hotel Pennsylvania located in Manhattan.
At the age of twelve and living at the Pennsylvania Hotel, she was chauffeured to her formal classes at the New York's Art Students League where she attended for three or four hours.
[4] Abe's shipping business closed with the beginning of World War I, when one of his tankers was torpedoed by the Germans and the survivors were shot in their lifeboats.
Abe was commissioned by the U. S. Government to scrap the German fleet,[6] and the girl's parents moved to Germany but left the children in the U.S. Celeste, the elder, who was nine years older and married, looked after Margaret.
Lefranc finished the last few months in school, and at the age of thirteen, traveled by freighter to join her parents in Berlin where she contracted rheumatic fever.
[7] Abe built her a small studio on the roof of their apartment building where Margaret drew in charcoals under the tutelage of a young art student who eventually told her parents to leave her alone and let her develop on her own.
Returning to New York, to renew her passport, aged eighteen, Lefranc was introduced by Claude Bragdon, a close friend her sister, to Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz.
She saw the works of Marc, Kollwitz, Lehmbruck, Heckel and other artists of Die Brücke, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.
With André Lhote, she learned how to apply paint to create flat, dryly handled planes of color, inspired by Cubism, and also more literal descriptive passages.
"[13][14] Clifton Fadiman, author, radio and television personality and Lefranc's brother-in-law's brother, dubbed the artist "Ur" Hippie.
During that time Lefranc decided to fund, open and direct an art gallery for gifted Americans located on the fifth floor of Thirty-seven West Fifty-Seventh Street.
She released him from his contract when Julien Levy promised Gorky an income of twenty-five dollars a month, which she couldn't match, plus exhibitions.
[16] Lefranc also represented the sculptor Chaim Gross, Saul Baiserman, Theodore Roszak, Ary Stillman, Jean Liberte, Lloyd Raymond Ney, Donald Forbes, Philip Reisman, Max Weber, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and many others.
At the same time, having been apprised by Thomas Mann of the arrival of his son-in-law in Taos, the Kieves met W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman at the bus station in the center of the village.
Mixed in with the vacation to Taos, Lefranc assisted in her family's real estate investments, worked as a textile designer and stylist (1938-1944); and served on the staff of the Cooper Union Museum (1944-1945).
"[5] By the time she left Cooper Union, Lefranc had already met Alice Marriott, author and anthropologist, who had come to New York in 1940 to help to set up the landmark American Indian Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, along with Rene d'Harnoncourt, Mary and Frederic Douglas and Kent Fisher.
"[24] Marriott had received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study the Indian potters of San Ildefonso Pueblo, near Nambe and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Lefranc and Marriott were suddenly homeless as it was the end of World War II, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory had swallowed all rental property in and around the area.
It was a life experience which Lefranc illustrated for Marriott in The Valley Below[25] and a story detailed for Lois Katz, author,[26] and for Sandra D'Emilio.
She also illustrated Alma Big Tree, a Kiowa Medicine Woman and traveled to Southern Cheyenne Reservation to paint an elder, Mary Inkanish, who was an expert on beadwork, which gouache was used as a frontispiece for one of Marriott's book.
She collected pottery, assisted Marriott in establishing small historical museums set up in store fronts, and traveled for research and artifact gathering.
A noted painter, illustrator, and editor, in 1948 Lefranc received a "Fifty Best Books of the Year" award from the Library of Congress in conjunction with the American Institute of Graphic Arts for her synoptic illustrations of pottery in Maria: The Potter of San Ildefonso; and in 1952 for Indians of the Four Corners, she was honored by the same organizations with a "One Hundred Best Books of the Year".
Before the contribution, this collection Lefranc exhibited artistically on a rust colored adobe wall in Nambe in a new living room which she had just finished building when Georgia O'Keeffe and Maria Chabot arrived for tea.
She assumed the management of their real estate, invested in the stock market and eventually bought the second oldest house in Coconut Grove which she restored.
Lefranc successfully sold her art, and exhibited at various museums throughout the United States while taking classes at the University of Miami to see what the "youngsters" were doing.
After her parents died during the 1960s, her traveling included Greece and a brief trip to Paris, but she mainly established a pattern of six months living in Miami and then Santa Fe and keeping up with her friends, Laura Gilpin, O'Keeffe, and others.