How important is a frame? Is it central to a painting or merely a
THINK of your favourite famous painting, the one you could describe with your eyes closed. Now try to remember how it is framed. A riot of gold-leafed carvings? A simple strip of ebony? Nothing at all? A tenner to a penny says you haven't the faintest. The market in images has no room for frames. Magazines, newspapers, exhibition catalogues and art books act as if they don't exist, cropping them out of reproductions even when the painters saw them as integral parts of their work.
Charles Willson Peale's trompe-l'oeil Stairway, which he framed like a doorway leading on to a wooden staircase, complete with lintel, posts and a bottom step that you could actually climb, is stripped of all these elements to become a bog-standard image of two young men on a staircase. Michelangelo's Doni Madonna is separated from the five prophets who gaze in at the mother and child from the grotesque gilded surround. Ingres's Portrait of Madame Moitessier, who is posing in a sumptuous flowery dress, loses the extravagant border of gilded blossoms and buds that the artist designed.
Matisse, who described the four sides of a frame as "the most important parts of a picture", must be turning in his grave.
But the frame-deniers aren't having things all their way. William Bailey, a framer-turned-lecturer and consultant to New York's Museum of Modern Art, has produced an eye-opening book on the subject. For him, the frame is not just a pretty border that protects the canvas, it is a mediator between viewer and painting.
"The design," he writes in Defining Edges, "must effect a transition from the existing physical location, usually a wall in a room or a gallery, into the illusionistic realm of the painting. This should occur graciously and imperceptibly. The frame should also prepare the eye and mind of the viewer to accept and embrace the domain of the painting on its own terms."
Bailey can point to countless famous painters for whom the frame was a central part of their art. Van Gogh worried incessantly about framing his work. Only one of his paintings retains its original frame, but it is hard to imagine a more perfect combination. For Still Life with Fruit (1887), he took a simple wooden border and painted it with two shades of yellow, cross-hatching it to echo yet update the carving of a traditional gilded frame. The result delights in its own right and forces your attention to the image it encloses. "It's the epitome of the idea of the gold frame, from a man with no money to purchase one," says Bailey.
Whistler, who could afford the real thing, created such a sensation with his experiments with finishes, patinas and paint that, even now, manufacturers turn out "Whistler-style" frames. Degas scandalised his contemporaries by using bright colours, and found time to invent a shape of moulding that remains popular with framers. In the 1930s, Hannah Gluck even patented her design, a quintessentially deco triple-stepped rectangle that could be painted to match its surroundings, or even wallpapered. That same decade, Dalí created the ultimate inner landscape by placing one of his desert scenes inside two human-shaped frames in Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds.
Major living artists such as David Hockney and Howard Hodgkin still believe frames serve a purpose beyond the purely practical. "They're where the picture stops and the world begins," Hodgkin says. When he paints, he carries his brush strokes over from the canvas on to the frames themselves "to make them part of the picture". Some traditionalists inevitably find this rather shocking: Brian Sewell, art critic of London's Evening Standard, was outraged when Hodgkin painted over an 18th-century gilt frame. But the artist is unapologetic: "One is operating in a sort of no-man's-land between the picture and the world. There are all sorts of ways one can use that area."
It would be interesting to see what future generations make of Hodgkin. Will some future collector or curator strip off his painted-over frames or add further borders? While those who reproduce art apparently take no interest in its setting, those who have custodianship usually think it could be improved.
"The frame is the only thing you can change about a painting," says Michael Gregory, managing director of Arnold Wiggins, a leading British frame dealer. "Once you've bought it, that is the only way you can personalise it." Even in the 18th century, rich owners thought nothing of reframing a picture to suit the changing decor of their homes. A century later, many of the impressionists saw their white or coloured frames swiftly discarded by conservative dealers and collectors.
Reframing is sometimes less than sympathetic. Bailey shudders at the thought of Van Gogh's unpretentious painting of clogs. "Around it is one of the most gorgeous Louis XV frames ever made - a gossamer, rich frame. They're both fantastic items. But in my mind, when the lights go down, they must have the most tremendous arguments and try to get as far from one another as possible. They have nothing in common."
Gregory, however, points out that apparently incongruous juxtapositions can work. His firm has supplied antique gilt frames for a number of Picassos. "Sometimes it's a way of interpreting a painting," he says, "and Picasso is now seen as an Old Master."
If the ornate frame has become a must-have for a certain kind of collector, framelessness is often seen as the natural state for contemporary art. But you can also view it as a mark of the reverence with which the artist is treated today. In the 19th century, when exhibition organisers crammed paintings on to every available inch of wall, European artists developed what became known as the salon frame, its ever-wider border a way of keeping the competition at arm's length. Now curators and collectors are constructing virtual frames of "quiet time" and "breathing space" around their cherished possessions.
To see one of the best examples, take a trip to Tate Modern in London, where a whole room is devoted to Rothko's abstract Seagram Murals. The canvases were originally due to hang in the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, but Rothko decided they didn't belong with the rich grunting at the trough. At the Tate, nothing but a murmur reaches them. The lighting is muted. The rectangles of red, maroon and black lie against grey walls, rather than the gallery's usual white.
A few minutes here and you feel cut off from the world. Rothko's pictures have no frames in the conventional sense. But what is this whole setting if not a frame? Every time a gallery or artist takes such elaborate steps to display work in the best light, what are they doing but framing it? The frame hasn't gone away; we have just stopped noticing it.
Defining Edges by W.H. Bailey is published by Harry N. Abrams
- Guardian New Service
