Exhibitions
The Art of the Picture Frame (National Portrait Gallery, till 9 February)
Feelings, not facts
Edward Lucie-Smith
The National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition The Art of the Picture Frame reflects the rising interest in the subject which has already made an impact in the auction room. Recent Christie's sales of antique frames have attracted fierce com- petition.
. In a way this is surprising, and in a way it Isn't. Those contemporary artists still con- servative enough to want to express them- selves through the medium of paint on a surface are often hostile to frames, con- vinced that traditional devices of this sort will somehow demean their efforts. Many large abstract pictures, in particular, are intended to operate as pulsating fields of colour, whose boundaries more or less escape the eye. To put a frame on a paint- ing of this sort is certainly counter-produc- tive. A few leading post-war painters, nevertheless, have opted for assertive frames. A case in point is Francis Bacon, whose blaring gold-leafed frames, made for him by Alfred Hecht, were an integral part of the effect made by his pictures. The same framer also worked for Graham Sutherland, and an example of his work can be seen at the NPG, on Sutherland's portrait of Lord Clark.
Other leading modern artists have, so to speak, had frames thrust upon them, not in response to their own taste but to that of their clients. When one of Cy Twombly's esoteric scribbles reaches the auction room from an Italian collection — and Italians have in recent years been great buyers of Twombly's work — it is often adorned with a handsome Genoese or Venetian baroque frame. Here the frame expresses both the owner's sense of the financial value of the painting, and his or her determination to make a link between it and a traditionally luxurious setting. `Classic modern' paintings in private col- lections — Matisses, Picassos, Braques, Dalis, Magrittes — are now almost invari- ably dressed up in sumptuous period frames. So, too, are things which were never originally meant to be framed at all, like Old Master drawings. The Eugene Thaw drawing collection now on view in the Sackler Galleries at the Royal Acade- my offers an array of adornments of this type. In the old days, collectors of drawings kept their treasures in portfolios. Now they want them on their walls. It is no wonder that the prices of period frames are going up and up.
This kind of grand but slightly incongru- ous framing is not a total innovation, though the impulse to mix-and-match arose in rather different circumstances. The Impressionists, for example, seem to have framed their work in two ways — either in very simple, light-coloured borders designed and often painted by themselves; or else in second-hand rococo frames stripped from 18th-century pictures. Such frames, bleached and aged a little, suited the Impressionist gamut very well.
The NPG exhibition, which largely con- fines itself to the British tradition, and to the kind of frames used on portraits, hints at these issues but doesn't tackle them directly. It demonstrates how the 'grand' frame was introduced in the 17th century, largely in response to the introduction of the grand full-length or half-length por- trait. It was a response, not to the quality of `Dame Ellen Teriy. by George Frederic Watts, c. 1864, with 'enriched Watts frame' the art but to the status of the sitter. It also shows the way in which, even now, histori- cally exact period framing remains an unattainable ideal. Our feelings about what is inside the frame always gets in the way. One of the most telling demonstrations of this is a panel with three same-size repro- ductions of the `Chandos' portrait of Shakespeare, wearing three different frames — the 18th-century Maratta frame in which it came to the gallery in 1856 (cut down and clearly borrowed from another picture), the mock 17th-century frame made for it in 1864, and the old (but sub- stantially altered and restored) tortoise- shell frame the painting now usually wears. None of these is authentic in style for an English portrait painted c. 1610. But the sequence reflects the shifting feelings and associations evoked, over a period of nearly 150 years, by what is usually accepted as the nearest-to-authentic likeness of our national poet. Feelings, not historical facts, are what successful frames are about.
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