AT AN ANNUAL MEETING of the Portrait Society of America, I was privileged to hear a presentation by John Howard Sandon, a preeminent portrait and figure painter. What surprised me most was his final, emphatic advice: "Don't let the buyer chose the frame. You must decide on the frame!" (I paraphrase).
Every painter, professional and amateur, comes up against this difficult choice. Both appearance and cost are at stake. Workload and convenience also figure in. The frame choice has remained unavoidable, and a topic of changing fashion, even after modernist art eschewed frames as petty.
Best we can tell, the idea of frames arose with architecture, particular Greco-Roman, and surely in the East as well. Greek amphora (vases) and the frescos of Pompeii, for example, reveal paintings with architectural-style framing painted in. Obviously, a frame defines and sets off a pictorial works of art, which always have had decorative purposes.
As architectural trim elaborated—one thinks of the Baroque period—so did frames for paintings or, back in the Middle Ages, frames for religious imagery. During the Italian Renaissance, with the re-discovery of linear perspective and depth, frames began to serve an additional purpose. They were the window through which you looked on the scene, a simulated field of depth.
As an aside, a Renaissance writer once noted that the sculptures of Donatello, the best of the best, did not take on their true aesthetic power until they were placed in a designed niche in a church or chapel. Framing made a difference.
Somewhere and sometime since, the building of a frame must have become such an elaborate priority that it would even eclipse the painting. For the most part, though, their decorative elan was meant to enhance the work on panel or canvas. The idea of a museum quality frame came to the fore, while the run of artists tried to make ends meet with whatever they could afford. Gallery owners and frame shops, if affordable, became places to go to get advice and product for the best possible frame. It became a sub-field of interior decoration.
That fate of the frame changed with the rise of modernist art and its new theories about the nature of a painting. To take one example, the 1950s art critic Clement Greenberg argued that, in the evolution of painting, it had reached its pinnacle under this definition: a flat surface. Period.
Hence, paintings, especially on canvas, were hung in the raw. This has become a popular style up to the present. To accommodate it, the "floater" frame was invented, so a canvas seemed to float in midair, but still with a linear definition around all sides.
Much about frames today is driven by tastes and the marketplace. Still, high-end frame shop keep a finger on the pulse of taste. They know which moldings are available and considered de rigeur. Here, of course, we are talking high-end, for painters today can buy frames from outlets online and save hundreds of dollars. Not a few painters haunt antique and thrift shops for old frames, typically well-crafted in wood, that can be had for a pittance and touched up.
For this large swath of lower-end ordinary painters (for at the high end, of which Sandon spoke, the thousands of dollars for a painting includes no limit on the quality of the frame), the choices can be confounding. It used to be that a modest, burnished gold frame spoke elegance, but then came the slogan, "Black is the new gold." Today the black or espresso (dark greenish brown) is usually favored. A gold liner is a final touch.
One thing I could never figure out is why the new market in "plein air frames" has decided on a 3-to-3-1/2 inch width as standard. When people buy a painting, size is relevant. It takes space on a wall. A very wide frame often makes the painting too large for the average home. To me, a 2-to-2-1/2 frame seem quite adequate to balance against paintings as large as 30x40 inches.
It's happily remarkable, meanwhile, that painters-as-shoppers can find very nice looking real wood frame for very good prices on the Internet. These are typically made in Mexico or Indonesia. Globalization has brought the prices down. At the same time, the variety of gaudy and cheap frames has proliferated as well.
I once saw a video on an artist's website that brought a chuckle. In time lapsed video, a painter completed a tiny painting, say 4x4 inches, of a kind of cartoon portrait. Then, with great flourish, put it in a very wide, elaborate gold frame that was perhaps 2-to-3 times as wide as the picture. A humorous commentary on frame extravagance, of course.
In former times, however, say the Middle Ages, work in gilt-gold and precious stones was valued more than a picture, and so we have devotional icons of similar proportions. I doubt that Sandon had this in mind when he insisted, with remarkable fervor, "You must decide on the frame!"