The Invisible Art of the Humble Frame

Frames are ubiquitous to the point that they’re unassuming. Paintings become art when bound in gilded frames, but we appreciate the former and seldom acknowledge the latter.

We also see frames in architectural, decorative and interactive contexts we never consider. Mirrors, whether hung or on stands, are often framed so we can get a curated look at ourselves. Plastic frames surround the dynamic content delivered by our phones, laptops and televisions. Nearly every representation of the world we see, unvarnished or dramatized or fantastic, is girded by a frame.

In the words of framers and historians Paul Mitchell and Lynn Roberts, picture frames are “the provision of an area of transition between the real world and that of the picture… the medium through which fine arts are merged with architecture and the decorative arts.”

The frame as art

Visual art, like paintings or relief carvings, had borders very early on, explain Mitchell and Roberts in their book “A History of European Frames.” From the earliest cave paintings and frescoes, the space where art was meant to live was delineated by painted lines or worked stone.

As European paintings became more formal, serving not just a decorative but also an artistic function, frames quickly became de rigueur. The earliest of these painting and frame pairings were cohesive—a block of wood with a hollow carved into it where the painter composed their work. Frame and painting as an unbroken whole.

Back then, there were hardly any celebrity painters of the sort we have now. Instead, a painter was a craftsman brought in to fill an elaborate sculptural edifice constructed by a master carver with an image he had little role in composing. Medieval contracts highlight the lesser importance of the painter and the primacy of the carver—it was the carver who earned the highest commissions, largely from churches who employed the artisans to glorify God and the church itself.

These frames were architectural pieces of stone, often in the shape of the same church where they were housed. They were furthermore freestanding and functioned as altars, rising up from the ground and offering the humble worshiper a vivid window onto full-color recreations of the religious scenes described by the clergy in their sermons.

The frame as metaphor

When you look out a window, you see an image that shifts depending on your viewing angle, making the frame the medium that defines the image. It delineates the separation between the inside of the house and the outside world, the interior life of the observer and everything else going on “out there.” Window frames are pure architecture yet also a precursor to some of the same logic that birthed picture frames: a true marriage of art, architecture and decoration.

“The frame lets a fragment of the world appear before us at a specific moment, and at the same time excludes all the rest,” wrote Danish art historian Karsten Ohrt in the preface of the catalog for a 2008 exhibition at the Statens Museum for Kunst called Frames: State of the Art. “It is a device that allows us to focus.”

Ohrt asserts that our framing of the world makes the world a more tolerable, manageable and even comfortable place. Without the frame to define our reflections, there can be no examined life.

“Thus the frame is a sort of intentional instrument,” he explained. “It sorts, structures, and organizes. Maybe all human perception can best be described metaphorically as frames, which in various and active ways filter and interpret the merciless stream of raw and multifarious sensory impressions that we are bombarded by.”

The frame as enhancement

Gertrude Stein’s impressions of the Louvre in her Lectures in America immortalized the modern sentiment that gilt frames are gaudy and ostentatious.

“The Louvre at first was only gold frames to me,” she wrote. “Somehow there with the gold frames and all, there was an elegance about it all, that did not please me, but that I could not refuse, and in a way it destroyed oil paintings for me.”

It’s a valid take, but one that might be unfair to the framers who built them. In galleries and museums today, we view art under direct, flat, electric light that shines steadily without variation on each piece. Before electric light, illumination was fickle. With candlelight, flames flickered, jumped and danced, creating complex patterns of shadow and light on canvases as the light reflected off the gilded molding of the frame, throwing sections and colors of the painted canvas into dramatic relief and shadow unattainable without the presence of a unique golden frame. This alone may have justified some of the more elaborate carving and ornamentation in what we think of as classic frames.

Some artists were particularly preoccupied with their frames. The French impressionist Edgar Degas was one—he wrote extensively about the frame-making process and designed all his own in careful consultation with the frame makers. Georges Seurat, a post-impressionist, was another—his dense, pointillist compositions incorporated painted frames within his canvases that interacted with the sturdy, physical frames which surrounded them. In A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, first painted in 1884 then updated in 1889, he added a painted, pointillist border that eases the transition between canvas and what was likely a plain white frame. In other works, like 1886’s Evening, Honfleur, Seurat lets his thousands of precise, colored dots spill out onto the frame itself.

Seurat was influenced by the impressionists, who disposed of the loud, ornamented frames of an earlier time. Their generous use of bright colors like orange also encouraged them to make do without gilt—the gold and the orange would clash too loudly. In a letter to the critic Maurice Beaubourg, quoted in Eva A. Mendgen’s “In Perfect Harmony: Picture + Frame, 1850-1920,” Seurat wrote that “The frame is in a harmony opposed to that of the tones, tints and lines of the picture.”

The frame evolving

Trends in framing continue to develop, shaping how frames are chosen in museums and galleries, yet some things don’t change. Carsten Thau, in an essay for “Frames: State of the Art,” writes critically on the integration of framed screens into every wall but acknowledges that frames create “a privileged zone of meaning and “a concentration of what we understand as the world.”

So, what has changed? Gone are the days of the ostentatious frame, born from the skilled hands of the master carver. The trend in frames today is less ornate, low-key and clean, says Ryan Douglass, a former art handler and framer who now works at the New York Public Library as a restorer.

The most common materials he sees now are woods like maple and walnut, Douglass tells Observer. The choice of wood matters, he says, because it determines how you’re able to stain the frame; different woods react differently.

To make a frame, he explains, the first thing you need to do is measure the artwork. Then, once the frame design is decided, everything has to be cut exactly down to the 16th of an inch.

“There is a bit of selflessness” in being a framer, Douglass says. “The best framer enhances the artwork” and “[makes] someone’s art look better.” He likes the work because he likes both working with his hands and working with art and making people’s art look better. It’s a good fit.

Framing remains expensive, Douglass says, because even though framing can be an afterthought, every material in the process is unique. Every frame should be a custom job.

What that means, however, can vary. Brooklyn-based artist Andrew Abbot, who paints eclectic, “obsessive” canvases with a Where’s Waldo? flavor, told Observer that he never pays to have his works framed.

In the city, he says, “I can always find interesting frames to use.”

Sometimes he’ll take antique frames, turn them backward and create a surface that fits the frame. At other times, the fantastic scenes in his paintings spill out of the canvas onto the frame. We assume painting precedes frame, but that’s not always the case.

“A lot of times I have the frame before I even start the painting,” Abbot says, in an unexpected nod to the framers of the medieval period. “In a sense, the frame can give birth to the painting.”