American picture frames.(Review)

A quarter of a century ago a picture frame was inseparable from its picture. Today, among the purists, the picture frame demarcates a section of wall. The elevation of the frame to an art form has resulted from a spate of scholarly consideration and has contributed to two allied but separate philosophical camps--those who still think of frame and picture as a unit and those who prize the frame on its own. Nevertheless, the new preoccupation with the frame has made everyone ponder the appropriateness of a given frame on a given picture, and for that we must all be thankful.

Both points of view are represented in the collection of essays entitled The Gilded Edge: The Art of the Frame, more accurately the American frame. Predictably, artists themselves have been most concerned about the marriage of frame and work of art. James McNeil Whistler, Frederic Edwin Church, Charles Caryl Coleman, Elihu Vedder, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, the brothers Maurice and Charles Prendergast, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, and Frederic Remington all at one time or another designed or specified the design of their frames. Their choices are considered in the essay by Suzanne Smeaton, who is with the frame dealer Eli Wilner and Company.

Church borrowed from Islamic and Moorish decorative patterns. Whistler, taking his cue from the English Pre-Raphaelites, experimented with reeded moldings and with various shades of gold leaf. Eakins on occasion became even more specific. He surrounded The Concert Singer with a chestnut frame on which he carved the opening bars of Felix Mendelssohn's Rest in the Lord. Then he shaped the singer's open mouth in the exact O of someone singing this passage.

A newspaper interviewer in 1887 wrote of the architect Stanford White, "When Mr. White gets tired of designing houses, he relaxes his brain with designs for picture frames. He does a limited number of these, most of them for personal friends, and whoever is the proud possessor of one may regard himself as particularly fortunate. For there is the same chaste elegance about a White frame as there is about a White building." As a proper magpie White scavenged old frames and resized them, used his knowledge of architectural moldings to create new frames, or communed with artist and picture to create an entirely new design. Like Whistler, he was much concerned with the shade of gold leaf and the play of matte and bright gilding. And the interviewer cited above may have been quite right about relaxing the brain, since White seems never to have charged for designing a frame.

Frederic Remington, in framing his dark nocturnes, took an entirely different aesthetic approach than Whistler in framing his nocturnes. As Sally Mills writes in her essay about western frames, "Unlike Whistler's exquisite frames, which enclose his painted nocturnes in a self-referential world of aesthetic harmony Remington's black frames encourage the viewer to enter and witness the artist's images in all their seductive gloom and mystery. They serve well ...