22 - 28 February 2001
Issue No.522
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 22 - 28 February 2001 Issue No.522 |
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In the frame
Stroll around any of the world's great art galleries -- they are, alas, few and far between -- and, despite the massive quantities of kudos that have come to rest on their contents often for no better reason than the simple fact that they are in situ, you will be doing exceptionally well if you fail to encounter vast tracts of the mediocre. Everything will be catalogued and attributed correctly -- until, that is, some new art historian on the block establishes a reputation by debunking the until then unassailable -- but it will remain virtually impossible to escape the niggling feeling that all is not as well as might be, and that a great many of the canvases hanging on the wall might be happier in storage, stacked in some distant basement and made accessible only to those with pressing research interests.
Even in the most glittering national collections, the Louvre, or London's National Gallery, only a fraction of the works of art on show resonate with the particular quality -- the hallmark of, for want of a better term, the masterpiece -- that at once sets them apart and allows them to communicate directly with the spectator. For the rest, the interest is largely historical, socio-political, anecdotal or else frankly eccentric. That is, until it comes to the frames.
A pity, then, that these latter -- ie the frames -- receive so little attention. Museum authorities will be perfectly happy to provide an exhaustive provenance, on request, for any of the works in their collections. Not a whisper, though, about the frames. Are they contemporary with the painting -- did, for instance, King Charles I choose that particular frame for Van Dyke's equestrian portrait of himself, or was it a later addition. Who was responsible for the framing of any one of those endless Mannerist madonnas, all elongated limbs and serpentine twists. When were they last reframed, and why?
This may all seem a mite nit-picking. Yet the major claims that are made for paintings that are second rate revolve almost exclusively around the ways in which they can be made to illuminate their times and, if one seeks to be exhaustively historiographic about it, which one should, the ways in which, by virtue of the manner in which they are viewed, they illuminate subsequent times. Which brings us back, though perhaps not as neatly as hoped, to the question of the frame.
The demi-lunar wavelets that arc in endless procession across Canaletto's Grand Canals seem invariably to be encased in gilded stucco. Perhaps all the frames are contemporary: these Venetian views, after all, were a de luxe precursor of the picture postcard and as such had none of the prestige attached to the more august art of the Italian Renaissance. Gilded stucco mouldings on a wooden background would be a reasonably priced compromise when it came to the frame: not quite a major expense, but smart enough to hang in the drawing room. No one told the buyers at the time that they were purchasing anything other than a Grand Tour souvenir, and few, one suspects, had an inkling that they were buying into what would become one of the canonical views of Western art. Had Canaletto's patrons had any idea what they were buying, they would, no doubt, have had quite astonishing things made from inlaid tortoiseshell and intricately carved nacre, the better to announce the importance of their holiday acquisition.
It is a complicated business, this framing of things. It involves, after all, the fixing of the periphery of the vision, of the edges, the marking of that place where the window onto whatever is being focused on suddenly stops. Nor is it a neutral act, the drawing of this particular closure, this peculiar line at once as flimsy as anything drawn in sand and as forceful as a door slammed in your face.
Voluminous writings, interminable discussions, have been devoted to the question of the edge. They have, though, focused almost exclusively on the artist's own cut off point. Indeed, the significance of some artists has been made to rest largely on the way in which they cropped their paintings. Pick up any monograph on Degas, for instance, and you can be certain that a large chunk of the text will be given over to discussing the radicalism of his framing of the image, the chopping of horses in two, the Japanese influenced tilting of perspectives, articulated all the more dramatically by having some foregrounded object savagely bisected. Such writing is almost inevitably accompanied by a discussion of the impact of photography -- its seemingly arbitrary cropping of the image -- on painting, though given the efforts of so many early photographers to replicate the pictorial conventions of easel painting these arguments have a tendency to ring hollow.
For some time now, of course, it has been fashionable to not quite frame. Violating the frame, like similar violations of the plane, ie the surface of the painting, represent one of the few late modernist strategies to have survived into contemporary practice. And just as Degas can be praised, to the practical (and shameful) exclusion of all else, for cutting horses in half, so some contemporary artists have built commanding reputations, and fabulously inflated prices, purely on their subversion of the frame.
Maybe it did all start sometime in the quattrocento, somewhere in Italy, when painters suddenly decided that they were in the business of picturing the world, or at least those bits of it worth picturing. A remarkable degree of editing must accompany such a conceit: even the most stubbornly material bits and pieces of reality would either have to be doctored to fit into the alloted space, or else ommitted altogether. And when you are recreating a version of the world, such omissions can never be entirely innocent.
Nor should the consumer's own cut off point be viewed as insignificant. The demarcation of boundaries, the underlining of the point where art and the liberties it takes with the world end and (a more real?) domestic existence begins, involves less the negotiation of transformation than the covering of a fissure. And if the tendency is to pass this over with a series of rococo scrolls, strips of bleached wood or -- more recently -- to ignore it altogether, this does not imply a successful bridging of the gap. The frame, or its absence, is a disguise, a gilding not of lily but of that shocking something the lily represents.
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