Framing the Issue: Looking Closer at the Art of the Frame

We see them every time we go to a museum, but we never really see them. Like Rodney Dangerfield, frames get no respect. Julius Lowy Frame & Restoring Company, Inc. hopes to reframe the issue of frame ignorance through an exhibition titled A Change of Taste: From the Gilded Age to the Craftsman Aesthetic; Featuring Beaux Arts and Arts & Crafts frames from The Edgar Smith Collection, which runs through April 15, 2011. By showing the artistry of these frames, Lowy harks back to an age when craftsmanship in frame design earned great respect from the artists whose works filled in the spaces between the gilding and carving. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Framing the Issue."

[Image: A rare carved and gilt frame by Charles Prendergast with ogee profile and intermittently spaced floral carvings alternating with plain burnished “mirror” panels in the Venetian style. The Italian technique of punch work or bulinatura is used around the floral carvings. This frame resembles a classic Venetian carved frame with an ogee profile dating from the early 18^th century sometimes referred to as a “Canaletto” frame. Hermann Dudley Murphy used this frame style as well and was also influenced in many of his designs by Italian techniques and ornamentation. Signed and dated on verso “Prendergast 1905.” Sight 25 5/8 x 15 ¾ inches; width 4 inches.]

[Many thanks to Julius Lowy Frame & Restoring Company, Inc. for providing me with the image above and press materials for A Change of Taste: From the Gilded Age to the Craftsman Aesthetic; Featuring Beaux Arts and Arts & Crafts frames from The Edgar Smith Collection, which runs through April 15, 2011.]

Absolutely

In his 1955 memoir titled It’s Me, O Lord, Rockwell Kent wrote, “There is a deeply satisfying finality about land’s end. Gone is that everlasting urge the island traveler feels to journey on and on; there are not further peaks to beckon you; you have attained the absolute.” Born June 21, 1882, Kent remains in many ways the American equivalent of England’s William Blake—a bold visionary who expressed ideas of the absolute in words and pictures. Kent’s And Women Must Weep or Shipwreck, Coast of Ireland (above, from 1927-1928) captures this sense of the absolute power of nature while simultaneously depicting the place of humanity within it. Kent studied under both Robert Henri and Abbott Thayer, two of the most spiritually oriented artists in America at the turn of the twentieth century. Henri believed deeply in vitalism and Kent clearly shared that same faith in an electric force in the universe far greater than any individual being. Kent is best known for his amazing illustrations in black and white for such classic works as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which was only rising to status as the Great American Novel when Kent illustrated a 1930 edition. As much as I love Kent’s graphic work, I think he gets even more cosmic in color.

Nudism and the cult of the body reigned in Europe in the first few decades of the twentieth century, but I’m not sure if Kent took that as his source for works such as Recumbent Nudes with Ringed Sun (above, from 1914). It’s entirely possible that Kent simply arrived at this image by extending the Romantic and Transcendentalist philosophy to the human body itself, unashamedly nude before the nourishing sun. Heliotherapy, also known as sun or light therapy, may be the source of the ringed sun baking the bodies beneath. Regardless of whether Kent subscribed to those particular cures, he did believe that freedom of the mind and soul could cure anything. For Kent, the good fight was always the fight against oppression, which won him the honor of being a target of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. An incurable traveler, Kent visited all kinds of peoples and studied their cultures closely, which allowed him to see clearly the bare truth that we’re all human beneath it all.

As fascinating as Kent’s sense of the beautiful side of the absolute is, his sense of the sublimely terrible side fascinates me even more. Kent’s House of Dread, Newfoundland (above, from 1915) shows a naked man leaning against a house built on a cliff’s edge as a crying woman leans out of a window above. The sense of dread created by the ambiguity of the situation reeks of the most dreadful works of Edvard Munch. A member of the golden age of American illustration, Kent knew the power of images to tell a story. Here, Kent tells the other side of the story of the absolute, the one fragile humanity doesn’t like hearing. Kent built a similar home on a rocky peak in Monhegan Island, Maine, that is now owned by Jamie Wyeth, grandson of another great American illustrator, N.C. Wyeth. Jamie’s style resembles that of his grandfather more than that of his father, Andrew Wyeth, so he understandably felt a kinship with Kent both artistically and spiritually. After several decades of obscurity thanks to the hostile political climate of the 1950s, Rockwell Kent has been reconnected with the body politic of art history and reminded it that it has a soul, too.

Starting Fires

One of the best and worse things someone can call you is a “troublemaker.” It all depends on who’s doing the name-calling. During his lifetime, enough of the wrong people called Rockwell Kent a troublemaker to ensure that he was the “right” kind. Born June 21, 1882, Kent studied art under some of the greatest American teachers of his era, including William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, and Abbott Handerson Thayer. Kent internalized not only the skills they taught him, but also their humanist spirit. In many ways, Kent stands as the American version of William Blake, another famous troublemaker. Kent’s Flame (above, 1928) seems like a reincarnation of Blake’s figures that yearned to fulfill humanity’s full potential against the oppressive powers keeping the everyman and woman down. Blake didn’t start the fire, but Kent kept it burning brightly in the early to mid twentieth century as America began to find its footing as a true world power.

Kent claimed to be a transcendentalist long after Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were gone. His illustrations to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass emphasized the transcendental aspects of those works and reinvigorated them for his generation. Kent’s striking illustrations for Moby-Dick especially contributed to the rediscovery of that work as scholars sought to shape an American culture in the 1920s to match the burgeoning American power between the wars. Kent’s Prometheus Unbound (above, from the 1920s) echoes not only Percy Bysshe Shelley’s take on the subject but also Blake’s idea of the “mind-forg’d manacles” that enslave humanity from within, i.e., the internalized constraints that we impose on ourselves and can only break ourselves. Just as Prometheus brought the spark of fire to humanity and paid for it with his freedom, Kent, too, paid for trying to light a spark in the lives of Americans, earning the brand name of communist and the unwelcome attention of McCarthyism, scourge of “troublemakers.”

Kent’s personal humanity is often lost in all the activism. In the 1920s, Kent actually published light-hearted cartoons under the pen name "Hogarth, Jr." that poked fun at the excesses of the Jazz Age. Kent travelled extensively, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego to Greenland and more, always connecting with the local people and culture, demonstrating a common touch to belie the perception of him as an intellectual “elitist.” Above all, Kent’s love for the ideal known as “America” burned so strongly that it could border on the corny. In Baker of the Bread of Abundance (above, from 1945), Kent gets almost Norman Rockwell-ish in his admiration for simple domesticity and, perhaps, even religious in his otherworldly figure hovering over the family as a makeshift household god. Despite attacks on Kent as “Un-American,” he was, if anything, hyper-American, dreaming of a utopia that the reality around him never lived up to, but which he never failed to work towards.

Lessons Learned

Whenever I see the name Jean-Leon Gerome I immediately think of his greatest student and one of my favorite artists, Thomas Eakins. Born May 11, 1824, Gerome taught many great artists in addition to Eakins (including Abbott Handerson Thayer, J. Alden Weir, Mary Cassatt, and Theodore Robinson, just to name prominent Americans), but he was a remarkable artist in his own right, albeit a bit of an anachronism stylistically as Impressionism raged all around him and he continued to paint neo-classically. The more I look at Gerome’s work, the more I search for keys to Eakins’ development. When I look at Gerome’s Phryne before the Areopagus (above, from 1861), I imagine Eakins having it in mind while painting The Agnew Clinic, in which another woman appears revealed before a semicircle of men, but in an operating theater rather than an ancient judicial chamber. Gerome’s Phryne before the Areopagus brought him condemnation for what many saw as a gratuitous excuse for painting a nude woman, yet he continued to paint classically inspired nudes for the rest of his life. Years later, when Eakins faced similar approbation for unashamedly studying the human body (and encouraging his own students to do the same), Eakins may have drawn strength from his old teacher’s example.

Gerome is known primarily as an Orientalist painter, traveling throughout Africa and the Middle East in search of material he translated into works such as Public Prayer in the Mosque of Amr Cairo (above, from 1870). It’s truly heartening to view the dignity with which Gerome depicts different cultures in works such as A Japanese Imploring a Divinity (1880), The Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors at Fontainebleau (1864), The Wailing Wall, and Recreation in a Russian Camp, Souvenir of Moldavia (1855). Sure, paintings of slave markets and harems can be found in Gerome’s oeuvre, but a single painting such as A Muezzin Calling from the Top of a Minaret the Faithful to Prayer (1879) outweighs all the cheesecake nudes painted for a buying (male) audience. Eakins rarely travelled, but it’s easy to see the same inquisitive nature that led Gerome to explore the world at large in Eakins’ paintings of the scientists, physicians, and clergy found mostly around his native Philadelphia.

The fact that both Gerome and Eakins struggled with public perception of their painted nudes took a similar toll on both artists. In 1895, Gerome painted himself sculpting a young nude woman in his studio, calling it The Artist's Model (above). From the positioning of the woman and the title of the work, Gerome clearly wanted to emphasize the importance of the human figure to his work. Gerome’s 1849 painting Michelangelo (aka, In His Studio) similarly placed the master beside the Belvedere Torso, just one of the classical nude statues that influenced Michelangelo’s works. I don’t know what paintings of Gerome’s Eakins may have seen, but in 1877 Eakins painted William Rush Carving his Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, showing his American predecessor William Rush working from a live, nude model just as Gerome looked back at Michelangelo’s example. In 1908, four years after Gerome’s death and just 8 years before his own, Eakins returned to the subject in William Rush and his Model. Although the title says Rush’s name, the artist shown is clearly a self-portrait of Eakins, who helps his nude model step down from the podium, allowing the human form itself to take center stage, just as in Gerome’s painting. I’ve never seen anything written about whether Eakins knew that late painting by Gerome. It would be even more remarkable if Eakins didn’t know it, as it would illustrate just how attuned these two artists—student and teacher—truly were, irrespective of time and place. Great minds, at least in this case, thought alike.

In the Arms of the Angel

Abbott Handerson Thayer, born on August 12, 1849, painted two extreme visions. One vision of beautiful, idealized women and children bordering on religious experience (such as his 1889 transformation of his daughter Mary into Angel [above]) helped him deal with the sudden death of two children in the 1880s and the institutionalization and death of his wife in 1891. The other extreme vision was that of nature’s ability to camouflage itself for protection, such as Peacock in the Woods (below), from 1907. Thayer, known as “the father of camouflage,” thus becomes simultaneously one of the most spiritually accessible and yet hidden figures of American art.

Along with his son Gerald, Thayer published a major work on protective coloration in nature in 1909 that military experts later used in World War I when designing uniforms and transportation. Thayer’s powerful works of natural disguise (many of which can be found here from a 1999 exhibit at the Smithsonian) show his close observation of nature's wonder. Another painting of a copperhead snake hidden in a bed of leaves is simply amazing in its believability. Thayer studied in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome, among others, and came away with an amazing naturalist technique to go with his innate spirituality. Thayer’s reading of German philosophy as well as his Transcendentalist bent went hand in hand with his love of nature and close observation of detail, perhaps as an escape from the sorrows of his own life. Rockwell Kent, another artist steeped in Transcendentalism, served as Thayer’s apprentice at one time.

Thayer’s family stood as the other escape from the tragedy of his life. In Virgin Enthroned (above) from 1891, the year of his wife’s death, Thayer paints his oldest daughter Mary (from the Angel above) with her siblings Gladys and Gerald, whom Mary raised as a second mother after their mother’s death. Mary becomes the Virgin Mary here, idealizing her youthful beauty as well as her virtuous dedication to her family. Sadly, Thayer himself suffered from bipolar disorder, struggling with depression while always reaching for the heights of idealistic, spiritual joy. Nothing can disguise how beautiful his paintings and the soul of their creator are.