Re-Air: How Painters Today Are Reframing… the Frame

0:04Hey, Kate here. We love to do deep dives into the trends that we see shaping the art conversation. and one of our favorites from the year was a look at the wild and inventive takes on frames. So for the holiday season, we want to revisit this fun discussion about why suddenly art frames are front and center for many painters as a way to push new boundaries in their work.

0:28Most of our understanding of art is mediated by the phone or mediated by the screen and people forget that the art object has dimensionality and that painting is not really just flat.

0:48I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:59Almost by definition, the frame of a picture is something that you are not supposed to notice. But if you go to the art galleries to see painting now, you might get a very different sense of what a frame can or even should do. Weird and wild frames that very much draw attention to themselves seem to be having a moment. Recently, Artnet writer Katie White had a piece on the site, Border Core, Why Frames Became the New Frontier in Contemporary Art. She looked both at the history of framing styles and talked to a number of contemporary painters to figure out what is causing so many to treat something that was literally considered peripheral to what they do as very much part of the main attraction.

1:40I think it's a fun, fascinating topic. Katie, I'm very excited to talk to you about it. I'm really excited to talk to you, too. I feel like I've been thinking about this article for a really long time. Oh, yeah? Well, let's start there. What inspired the story? When did you notice this, I don't know what you want to call it, a mini trend? Yeah, maybe a mini trend. I was thinking about this ahead of this conversation. And I have to say, I think it goes back almost two years. In 2023, I interviewed this painter, sculptor, Stephanie Temmeheir, who makes these really distinctive three-dimensional kind of sculptural frames.

2:18And I talked to her for border core. But I had written a profile of her and her frames come in all these sorts of unexpected forms. They're ceramic, so maybe lobsters or rubber tires or a horse or something really crazy. And they frame these oil paintings. And she had started her training as a painter, but then merged outwards and started creating these frames that interplay with the paintings themselves. And they can be kind of funny and surrealistic. I think that conversation kind of got me started on this path of thinking about frames or paying attention to frames. And then almost a year ago, exactly during the New York fairs, I walked around with a friend of mine to freeze, not a future fair.

3:04then I was like, okay, this is the thing. There's a lot of artists either making frames or choosing really experimental frames. And I didn't know why or necessarily see how any of them were connected, but that started me on the path, talking to artists, talking to other writers to see what was going on there. You talk in this article about the contemporary artistic frames vogue. You also dig into art history. Are there great frames in art history that stand out to you? Things that you think about in reference to this new trend? Yeah, I mean, I think that I have mentioned this to everyone on our team, but when I was researching this story, I got really obsessed with this website called The Frame Blog, which is run by this historian named Lynn Roberts, who's kind of charted the history of frames independently.

3:56everything from, you know, Greco-Roman times to recent contemporary artists. Anyone interested in the history frame should check that website out because there are so many cool frames to discover. But me personally, I think that in my mind, like when I was thinking about artists using frames experimentally, I was thinking of parallels from the early 20th century. So Florine Stetheimer, I love her. She's like a modernist painter, for those who don't know, who kind of did like these whimsical theatrical paintings with her friends from society and them a lot of the time. And she would design and have fabricated these frames that kind of echoed the subject matter, echoed her own home decor.

4:41Like one specifically I'm thinking of is at the Whitney. It's called Sun. And I think 1930, 1931, she painted it for her 60th birthday. And the frame, It's basically a bouquet of flowers, but the frame is made to like echo the lace that was in her West 58th Street apartment. So I think about that. Also Frida Kahlo, I think of too, she didn't design her own frames, but she would a lot of the time purchase frames at flea markets in Mexico and then adapt the frame paint on it herself. But they're very object like frames. A lot of times with like shells or glass involved in some kind of intricate way.

5:20So those are the two I think of. That's so interesting because the frame just does have this interesting status where it marks the edge and where the environment ends and the image begins. But it's a little bit of both. So I think it definitely has this status in art history as either being invisible and fading into the background or being just where the image becomes visible and becoming a part of the painting. And you really see an art history artist navigating that border. I do want to get a little bit of art history because this is a Katie White joint. And this is one of the things you really bring to the site.

6:01It is a focus on art history. And also art history is something that a lot of these artists are thinking about. So where does the history of the frame in, I guess, the European tradition begin? Yeah, so the concept of the frame as we know it today, which is a removable object around a work of art, is roughly the 15th century in Europe. So kind of coinciding with the rise of secular genres of art. And I think there's a number of reasons that you can think of that. So it's like more art being hung on a wall in a home rather than a devotional object or something to like aid in your prayer or religious thought.

6:45And so that's kind of where the frame as we know it today arrives. But there were framing devices that go back to Greco-Roman times. And those might be just a simple wood kind of buttressing around a painted object to protect it. But also what I thought was interesting is in Pompeii, people painted frames around things on the wall. So the frame is kind of like a decorative border around something exists outside of just the world of a painting with the frame around it. Yeah. And then like even these old frieze sculptures, so like sculpture that were done on a flat surface, they would make decorative borders around those as well.

7:27So it's a sculpture, mostly flat sculpture, and there's still this idea of the frame around it. So even the earliest ideas of the frame were not necessarily like it was a physical object necessarily. It was like the idea of a frame. Oh, I love that. I mean, it's sort of the opposite about what we're talking about today, the contemporary thing where it's a painting becoming sculptural. This is like a flat surface, almost faking that it has this sculptural border. A lot of people, when they think about the frame, will think about these gilded ornamental frames that we associate with grand European painting.

8:00When does that tradition kick in? So the gold kind of has been there since really the beginning. And I think that you can think about that as remnants of like a reliquary type of object where there's like a painted scene or a vignette within a larger object or even Byzantine art, like the golden hue of the background. Early frames, a lot of the time in the medieval era, kind of reflect architecture. So they will maybe mimic the shape of like a cathedral or something. But then the gold frame really kind of solidifies into the standard where there's not painting on it and things like that in the 1700s.

8:40And it became really the defined way of showing art so much that even it was like codified by the salon so that you had to show your work within a gilded frame, even in a rectangular shape was part of the rules of the salon. So yeah, by the 1800s, it was really maybe becoming rote and played out. And I think we'll talk about the dawn of industrialization and what that has to do with it. These were markers that you were looking at something important, I guess, like gold or gilded. So bringing the kind of sense of preciousness. You're looking at a treasured image surrounded by ornament. And these are often hand carved, right?

9:24There's some craftsmanship. There's an art to framing itself. And then that changes a little in the 19th century, in the age of industrialization. That's something I knew nothing about. And honestly, it was really mind-blowing to me because, you know, you go to a museum and you just are like, oh, another gold frame. I never really thought about the difference between like a well-done, ornate gold frame that was hand-carved. And people at a different era would have been able to tell that this is like kind of junky, like in a way that I never thought of. So in the like mid to late 1800s, along with almost everything else, industrialization factories are taking over the Western world.

10:08And gilded frames that had been made by hand kind of gave way to these assembled, almost prefab frames. So they're made, instead of just wood being carved and then maybe painted over, it's made from something that was called economical paste, which is like so unglamorous sounding, and then mold and kind of assembled together and then maybe painted over with gesso and then gold leaf. But they were, you know, kind of became almost like a dime a dozen versus the hand carved frames where there had been, even within the world of gilt frames ornate gilt frames, a level of artistry. They just kind of became increasingly rote.

10:47And artists took note of that. There was even some critic who made some comment about the disparity between the quality of the artwork and the quality of the frames at the salon in the 1860s. Oh, I love that. Yeah. I think that's very fascinating because it is this transitional moment. There's a broader audience for art, age of the rising middle class and the bourgeoisie and so on. And they're still mimicking aristocratic style, but in the new industrial idiom. And you lose some of the invention of having handicrafts brought you because there were individuals inserting different things. And really, you get a bunch of simulations of aristocracy, which caused a reaction in various directions from artists in the mid to late 1800s.

11:31What are some great moments in framing history here? So a group of artists that I did not really know much about, the Nazarenes, were the sect of German romantic artists who were some of the first people to move away from just the ornate guild frames and start making their own frames. They were interesting, but like a smaller kind of group. And then from the Nazarenes, a couple decades later, you get the pre-Raphaelites in England, and they really were super influential, doing a lot of their own frames, either designing them, making them themselves. That's like William Holm and Hunt and Dante Gabrielle Rossetti and Millet.

12:10And what I thought was interesting about them is that they were looking back to a lot of the Flemish artists. One of their quote unquote innovations that really simplified the frame is that they were painting gold leaf directly onto wood. And so you could see the wood grain, you could see the carvings and they used simplified, more modern design. They were really, really interesting. And that group of artists would wind up having a huge impression on Whistler and then through Whistler into the Impressionists, who were the next generation of artists to really innovate frames. Before we get to the Impressionists, I just wanted to say, I mean, you always hear this about the pre-Raphaelites, that it's a reaction to industrialization.

12:52There's kind of this romance of the medieval in the imagery. People probably know these images of knights and maidens and nymphs and so on that are very characteristic of pre-Raphaelite art. I just think it's interesting that it also manifests in the frames, that they're also reacting against industrial gilded frames and the cheap forms of virtuosity that you see around them and in the frames as they were in the art itself. I think they're so interesting, too, because I feel like pre-Raphaelites get written off a lot as having like fluffy subject matter or not really very conceptual, but they're very materially conceptual, which I think is interesting.

13:35Like the materials that they're using or working with or the frames themselves, they care about that. I had an art history professor who said that everything starts in decorative art and catches up to the painted world later. So I feel like that holds true for them. For sure. That seems to be the case with the frames, right? So the Impressionists, who, depending on where you want to start your timeline, are one of the first real modern art movements, also have their hand in this whole rethinking of the frame. So what happens there? So I think a lot of the Impressionists would have seen Whistler's work.

14:10And John McNeil Whistler was working in this tradition of the pre-Raphaelites, but also very influenced by Japanese art. He had these gilded frames, but they were very simplified and they would seen his work. And I think from there, the Impressionists go really to the next level. And so 1877 is when critics really start talking about the archetypal weight frame that we know about today. And that's because Degas and Pizarro showed a lot of their works in these white architrave style frames that are super, super simplistic. And that really caused an uproar among people then, which also interesting to me is they were showing in white frames, but also there were Monet, Mary Cassatt, Berth Morseau.

15:01They were showing in colored frames too, but just very simple. So think red or pink or green, but just not the elaborate decorative of molding that had been popular to date. And what is also interesting about this, part of it is probably born of economy, that they didn't really have a lot of money and they were trying to get commissions through the sale of these works. So they are just putting on as simple frames as possible. There is some theorizing that the white frames were influenced by that color theorist, Eugene Chevrolet, who thought that white would heighten the effects of other colors, which they were all really invested in.

15:44Which also is funny to me is that even in the time that these frames were being put on, people didn't like them. So people would buy them and then replace the frames immediately. And the only reason that really there's any record of these frames existing is because Degas closely guarded his work. And so he kept a few in his possession with these frames on them. Even like for sale at auction recently, like these frames have been taken off.

16:16Impressionist paintings look great without a frame. There are images that are about landscape and atmosphere and they truly look great without a frame. But you will also see them all the time in these heavy gold frames. It's interesting to think that they exist in this moment of transition about how an image relates to its environment. It's the age of plein air painting and so on. What an image even is, the sense that it's a more direct relationship to its environment also yields a different way of thinking about the border. There's actually a lot in this small and technical subject. So this is a big subject, but we have the entire 20th century to jump over before we get to the present.

17:00In broad strokes, what happens in the 20th century with frames? This is where we get the idea of the frame now, which is something that should recede into the background, something that should be simplified to let the canvas speak on its own terms. And there were a couple of really funny moments, especially in the mid-century, where there is like a push to make frames invisible. And there was this clip frame, you know, like a glass pane and then clips on the side, not viewable from the side that would let you present an artwork kind of floating without boundary. They're called build schraggers, which I found out translates literally as image carrier, which I do think is good to know because it's not like a frame to support or accentuate.

17:49It's literally just something to carry the image so that it can be visible. And I think the rise of modernism, it was quasi-philosophical that art is boundless and that it kind of can be viewed without boundary floating in space. And there were moments where things reached extremes. There were a couple of exhibitions in Europe in the 1940s after the war when classical Italian masterpieces were taken out of frames that mimicked their original frames, maybe. And they were hung in these clip frames, essentially, with no borders. And so you're seeing like a Giovanni Bellini, Christ on the Cross in a very modern frame.

18:29And some people loved that. Some people hated it. But the issue with those frames is that, honestly, they're not that secure for a long-term exhibition. So they would start to slip down and there's conservation issues. It's like the painting is literally naked. Yeah, exactly. And it's interesting, that issue with unframing the old masters. It points to how the frame, you don't see it, but you do see it. You see it, but it's not there. You realize, oh, it's part of the way I've always seen these images is surrounded by this certain kind of ornament or decoration. And that gives me a certain kind of experience and set of associations with it.

19:05What do you think, then, is behind the heightened emphasis on the frame that you notice now? I think it's a couple of things. I don't think that there is just one thing that artists are after, but there's overlapping reasons. I think that what you just said, the frame as the way that you see the painting, that you conceptually, like you understand the frame as part of the extension of these older paintings. For some artists, it's like really a desire to have a conversation with that history and kind of have a conversation with art history and the canon. There's this artist I thought was like really interesting who showed at the last Venice Biennale.

19:52His name is Kang Sung Lee and he's based in Los Angeles, Korean born artist. And he will create frames that are wooden made from different wood grains that can be very materialist significant. But sometimes he creates these almost plinth like frames where you're viewing the works horizontally rather than vertically. And there'll be big wooden framed objects with these spaces in them where he'll add different artworks that he's worked on. And I think that is something that a lot of artists are after, sort of like this relational understanding of the art object. So something that's a little bit more diffused.

20:27Like activating the space around it. Yeah. And activating like the interaction between given artworks. I honestly, when I was thinking about this, was thinking about art history nerds like Abby Warburg and the Picture Atlas, where it's this associative relationship between like artworks or the art and the frame. And there are other artists, this woman, Valerie Hegarty, who is a New York City artist, and she creates these multimedia kind of sculptural works. They look like centuries old paintings. So she like will recreate an Albert Bierstadt and make it look like it went through some like ruinous calamity or something like that.

21:03And for an artist like her, the frame is like, this is a set narrative. And when it's landscape painting or she deals a lot of like the language of manifest destiny and Hudson River School, it's kind of trying to break open that conversation and think of history with a more critical conversational eye. So it's a variety of things. That one is very much like breaking the frame. Yeah. There's a work by her at the Brooklyn Museum. It looks like a ruin. And it's about the idea about how the frame makes you think about you're looking through a window into another world. And suddenly the way she literally smashes the frame and gives you this ruined painting makes you think about the whole thing as an object.

21:46There's something about objectness, you know, the objectness of the image in a lot of these examples. I definitely think that's true. There's a couple of artists, Stephanie, who I mentioned, Stephanie Temer-Heyer. She really digs into how we live in a very super flat world where most of our understanding of art is mediated by the phone or mediated by the screen. And people forget that the art object has dimensionality and that painting is not really just flat. There is something she said that I'm going to read. And even the modernists were obsessed with the thickness of paint and how that contributed to the feeling of the image.

22:30Now, paintings are so flattened by the photographs that represent them, we can forget that objects possess a real presence. Yet somehow, when a painting is framed by a sculptural, non-rectangular frame, it can reanimate its presence on the wall. And a couple of artists I talked to spoke about that in different ways, whether it's that the materials that they're using for the frame have like an atavistic meaning that's like quasi-spiritual. There's this New York artist, Miami-born artist, Almendra Bertoni, where she creates these pseudo-religious frames. So like doves or praying hands to her surrealist paintings.

23:06For her, she's just like, yeah, people have really shortened attention spans from just scrolling. and the objectness stops people and reminds them that it's an object. So I think that that's definitely something people are talking about. And I think artists are maybe frustrated that people's encounters with their works are mostly through a cell phone versus like in real life. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that the frame is about how the image relates to the rest of the world. And rethinking the frame is probably going to have something to do with how people are relating to images in the world.

23:39And what's interesting and why I wanted you to go into the art history is because there is this whole relationship of the frame to industrialization and rethinking the frame in relationship to how the material world is changing. And this seems to be a new permutation of that, that the image has to be rethought in relationship to its materiality because images somehow have been cheapened. That's what I'm reading in your article. I wanted to mention this artist, Holly Lane, who is a slightly older artist, right? But that comes up as a star example, just because it does resonate with some of this neo-medievalism and the history of the carved frame.

24:22Yeah, so Holly Lane, she was new to me too. I had noted her in the process of writing this article and then only remember to reach out to her a couple of days before I was filing the article. So she was really amazing and talked to me quickly and really, really changed the way I see a lot of things. So she was an early pioneer of this reinvestigation of frames. And last fall near San Jose, this museum, New Museum Los Gatos had like a solo retrospective of her work. And so she's a California artist who back in the 1980s started milling these elaborate wood frames that harken back to the Renaissance.

25:02And like they can really be dimensional sculptural objects. And then she has these paintings, which are. They're thick. They're thick. Yeah. Like it's like a feels like a piece of furniture. Exactly. They're really dimensional coming off the wall. And yeah, I think of like a tabernacle, like a literal religious object. They're sizable. And her paintings within them are often kind of landscapes. I would think that they're like reinterpretations of almost German romanticism, these kind of revelatory landscapes. Caspar David Friedrich would come to mind, who we have talked about on the website recently.

25:36She had a great quote that said back in the 80s when she was in school, if a painting had a frame at all, it was a thin line serving as protection for the art and as a conceptual dividing line. A good frame was to be inconspicuous. If I made the frame itself art, that was conspicuous and relevant to painting, then I could erode that sense of border and posit that art has no borders, especially to our mind and soul. So she's like flipping the script in her own way. I was asking her, where did this idea come from? And she told me that when she was a student at San Jose State in the 80s, she was in the library thinking about like her work and she came across illuminated manuscripts in the library and was really moved and inspired by the ways that the borders, so the medieval manuscripts of a religious text or whatever, a lot of times the monks or the nuns who created them would create these borders that kind of commented on the text itself.