In a letter to the critic Maurice Beaubourg, quoted in Eva A. Their generous use of bright colors like orange also encouraged them to make do without gilt-the gold and the orange would clash too loudly. Seurat was influenced by the impressionists, who disposed of the loud, ornamented frames of an earlier time. Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte’ was reframed by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022 to match the artist’s intentions. In other works, like 1886’s Evening, Honfleur, Seurat lets his thousands of precise, colored dots spill out onto the frame itself. In A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, first painted in 1884 then updated in 1889, he added a painted, pointillist border that eases the transition between canvas and what was likely a plain white frame. Georges Seurat, a post-impressionist, was another-his dense, pointillist compositions incorporated painted frames within his canvases that interacted with the sturdy, physical frames which surrounded them. The French impressionist Edgar Degas was one-he wrote extensively about the frame-making process and designed all his own in careful consultation with the frame makers. Some artists were particularly preoccupied with their frames. This alone may have justified some of the more elaborate carving and ornamentation in what we think of as classic frames. With candlelight, flames flickered, jumped and danced, creating complex patterns of shadow and light on canvases as the light reflected off the gilded molding of the frame, throwing sections and colors of the painted canvas into dramatic relief and shadow unattainable without the presence of a unique golden frame. Before electric light, illumination was fickle. In galleries and museums today, we view art under direct, flat, electric light that shines steadily without variation on each piece. It’s a valid take, but one that might be unfair to the framers who built them. Photo by: Exotica.im/Universal Images Group via Getty Images “Somehow there with the gold frames and all, there was an elegance about it all, that did not please me, but that I could not refuse, and in a way it destroyed oil paintings for me.” Painting of a ‘La Grand Odalisque’ in the Louvre. “The Louvre at first was only gold frames to me,” she wrote. Gertrude Stein’s impressions of the Louvre in her Lectures in America immortalized the modern sentiment that gilt frames are gaudy and ostentatious. It delineates the separation between the inside of the house and the outside world, the interior life of the observer and everything else going on “out there.” Window frames are pure architecture yet also a precursor to some of the same logic that birthed picture frames: a true marriage of art, architecture and decoration. When you look out a window, you see an image that shifts depending on your viewing angle, making the frame the medium that defines the image. ‘The Calvary,’ 1440-1445, by Giovanni da Fiesole, known as Fra Angelico (ca 1400-1455), fresco. They were furthermore freestanding and functioned as altars, rising up from the ground and offering the humble worshiper a vivid window onto full-color recreations of the religious scenes described by the clergy in their sermons. These frames were architectural pieces of stone, often in the shape of the same church where they were housed. Medieval contracts highlight the lesser importance of the painter and the primacy of the carver-it was the carver who earned the highest commissions, largely from churches who employed the artisans to glorify God and the church itself. Instead, a painter was a craftsman brought in to fill an elaborate sculptural edifice constructed by a master carver with an image he had little role in composing. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Imagesīack then, there were hardly any celebrity painters of the sort we have now. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images) Paris, Musée Du Louvre. Large Round Pieta, 1400-1410, attributed to Jean Malouel (ca 1365-1415), tempera and gold on panel, diameter 65 cm.
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