Returning to the Frame Game

By Richard Lacayo

Painters garnish the edge with daubs, cutouts, even cutlery

"The Louvre at first was only gold frames to me," Gertrude Stein once wrote. "In a way it destroyed paintings for me." By the early 20th century, artists and enlightened collectors were already beginning to do away with old-fashioned picture frames, with their gilded inlets and adamant pirouettes. Let painting be painting, they decided, without a competing spectacle at its own borders. This preference soon converged with Bauhaus notions of design, which enforced the modernist distaste for frills. By midcentury, the opponents of effusive framing had their ultimate triumph: the frameless wafers of abstract expressionism.

No conquering style in the arts, however, is safe from a return of the vanquished, often dressed as an avantgarde. Today spartan modernism has been surprised in its sleep by a postmodern taste for ornament and the revival of moribund styles. Partly as a result, some artists are garnishing the edge again. Trompe l'oeil frames, tutti-frutti borders and jigsaw-cut silhouettes are multiplying in galleries that not long ago featured only trim metal runners.

The change reflects new fashions in art. Impassive styles of the 1960s and '70s -- the chaste morsels of minimalism, the arctic pleasures of conceptualism -- are now well in retreat before a wave of gesture, expressionism and all the tumult of "painterly" painting. Encouraged by a climate favoring vigor and personality, artists are propelling the brush past the borders of the canvas or turning out sculpturally elaborated frames that complement work in which the hand prevails. At the same time, a general drift away from resolutely flat abstractions and a return to representational painting have revived notions of the picture as a window onto the illusion of a three-dimensional space. Says Painter Neil Jenney, who uses oversize frames to magnify his intentions as a realist: "Illusionistic painting demands a frame. It functions as a foreground. The frame is 'here,' with you; the illusion is 'there,' in the picture."

Not surprisingly, playful frames are most often found around the work of newer artists, the ones most likely to resist received tradition (and to follow fashion). A deliberately cartoonish image by Kenny Scharf sports edges decked with plastic dinosaurs and rockets. Larger-than-life wooden silhouettes -- two birds, for instance, or a garland of branches -- shoot up around the landscapes of Alan Herman. More established figures are also working in the same vein. Howard Hodgkin, whose canny strokes of pigment hint at enclosed views, sweeps paint across the frame to twit its pretensions as the final proscenium.

Like Hodgkin, some artists are not so much working on the frame as working past it. They spill color across its borders to reject its entrenched authority. Others are working with decorative attachments and sculptural effects, not mocking the frame but embracing it, to restore a bit of the heraldic function that frames sometimes filled in the past.

The frame also has its uses for artists looking to make abstract work more articulate. Two years ago, Robert Morris began showing a series of white bas-relief works that seemed to vent nuclear anxieties in a visual language of medieval fatalism. Embedded in an infernal slurry of plaster, human faces and fractured skeletons held the poses of apocalyptic death agony. This year Morris returned to painting with a series of more ambiguous abstractions. But a skeletal frieze has been retained along the frame to specify the note of mortal dread. Similarly, in 1979 Jasper Johns embedded a train of cutlery along the perimeter of Dancers on a Plane, inspired by musings on the multiarmed Hindu god Shiva. "I was thinking about many-handedness," Johns explains. "I made the association with the handling of utensils, and put them along the edge to suggest that the painting had some meaning beyond pure abstraction."

All of this attention to the frame comes at a time when some museums are reconsidering the question of how to mount their collections. Most paintings come to museums framed by dealers or patrons, not by the artists, and curators have often felt free to update. Two years ago, the National Museum of American Art, in Washington, took the reverse route, restoring ornate frames to paintings it had earlier reset in plain wooden strips. Says Chief Curator Elizabeth Broun: "We thought it was more historically correct."

More recently, New York City's Museum of Modern Art created a minor controversy when the director of its department of painting and sculpture, William Rubin, had the work of a few early modern masters, among them Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, refitted in no-frills borders. Part of Rubin's rationale was that undistracting borders would help to clarify continuities between the early modern painters and their inheritors, from Picasso through Johns, whose work elsewhere in the museum is likewise in simple frames. "Very successful," says Thomas Messer, director of the nearby Guggenheim Museum, which has a reputation for simple frames. "Very institutional," says Scott Schaefer, curator of European painting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "I think it looks terrible."

The shake-out in frames is yet to come. The genuinely imaginative conceits are already outnumbered by gratuitous doodads that seem to have little function except to disguise inert painting. After the challenging stringencies of painting in the 1970s, artists and buyers are in the mood for a little fun. But a flood of gimmicky borders may send them fleeing back to the pleasures of the unembellished edge, and remind them that, after all, the main event is on the canvas.

-- By Richard Lacayo