Denne dumpet akkurat ned i innboksen min og det er sikkert flere her inne som finner disse tankene interessante.
The Louvre owns some 9,000 picture frames, and around 6,000 are in use at any given time, the writer Lauren Collins reveals in a New Yorker piece about a show at that French museum that has a wonderfully self-explanatory title: “Regards sur les Cadres” (“Looking at Frames”). “The frame must valorize the painting,” the show’s curator, Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau, told Collins. “With a successful frame, you don’t see the frame. But if a frame is too weak, or not up to the level of the painting, it seems improperly hung.”
I can’t improve on those thoughts, but I’d add that there are rare instances when a frame adds something very special to a picture, becoming—as Dave Hickey once defined ornament—a “celebratory intensifier.” For example, Florine Stettheimer’s 1923 portrait of Marcel Duchamp is a charmer, but it’s the frame she designed—the letters “M D” repeating around the picture—that makes it giddily irresistible. And I’m always a sucker for the decadent, gaudy gilded frames that Franz von Stuck conceived, which amp up the sex and drama and mystery in his smoky paintings.
—Andrew Russeth, Executive Editor
