There’s something eerie about an empty frame. A vibrant segment of the stock-photo industry would cease to exist were it not for our fear of the void. During the Second World War, many of the Louvre’s paintings were evacuated to the countryside, leaving rooms full of empty rectangles. Germain Bazin, an influential curator at the time, turned his attention to frames, taking advantage of the absence of canvases to devise better ways of framing paintings and even using a portion of the museum’s heating budget—it was closed, after all—to acquire new ones. “Buy frames!” he wrote to Christiane Aulanier, a colleague, in June of 1944. “Tomorrow the Americans will make a clean sweep of the few that will have been left by the Germans!”
Today, the Louvre possesses one of the world’s largest collections of frames, with around six thousand in use and another three thousand in storage. This year, all of them are being inventoried for the first time, under the direction of Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau, a curator in the Department of Paintings. She and her team recently put together an exhibition, “Regards sur les Cadres” (“Looking at Frames”), which ends next month. The idea is “to interrogate the complex role of the frame,” Chastel-Rousseau said the other day. “The frame must valorize the painting. 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.”
Frames, as we know them, became popular in Italy during the Renaissance, when painting began to detach from the wall. (You can’t frame a fresco.) They made art portable, which meant that proud patrons could show off their collections wherever they went. Van Gogh created his own frames; the only one that survives is a simple wood border that, gilt being beyond his means, he painted with yellow cross-hatching. You can often tell an American picture frame from a European one by the vegetation that appears in the molding: acanthus for the Continent, tobacco and corn for the New World.
The first room of the show at the Louvre is just frames, no paintings. Chastel-Rousseau, showing a visitor around, started with a sixteenth-century Italian frame that dominated the right wall. Its scrollwork was so pronounced, it looked as though you could pick it up by two leaves, like a dinner tray. Male heads poked out of carved roundels in each corner. “It’s a masterpiece,” Chastel-Rousseau said, pointing to one of the little men. “Here, look at the details of the beard. I find it all the more fascinating because I have no idea for which painting it was ordered.”
In another room, three still-lifes by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, the eighteenth-century master, hung in frames of various styles. A Louis XV frame, described by experts as having “pierced scrolling foliate & rocaille corners with diapered ground & floral rinceaux,” had a daintier effect than a Louis XVI frame, made stately by the addition of a cartouche. An eighteenth-century channelled frame had so many borders that each side was as wide as the canvas. Its ornateness contrasted with the austere painting it housed, which depicted a copper cauldron and a trio of eggs. “You can think about frames and paintings the way you think about wine and cooking,” Chastel-Rousseau said. “You can stick with classic pairings, but sometimes a bold, unexpected choice works perfectly.”
The most prized frame is a frame d’origine. The next best option is one that approximates the painting’s provenance in both style and era. At the Louvre, the average painting has had around three different frames. “Either we find one in storage, we buy an old frame with the style we’re looking for, or we create a frame,” Chastel-Rousseau said. Two floors below, artisans were at work in the museum’s atelier encadrement dorure, which handles anything made of gilded wood. A gilder named Elisabeth Grosjean was bent over a huge frame that, until recently, had contained a landscape painting. It had fallen off a wall in an embassy, and some giltwork had snapped off. Grosjean was touching it up with a sheet of twenty-carat-gold leaf that resembled a chewing-gum wrapper. She placed the leaf on a velvet cushion, blew on it to flatten it, cut it with a gilder’s knife, and applied the pieces to the frame with a tiny paintbrush, before coating them with a glue made from rabbit skin. “What’s beautiful is to see the frames by candlelight,” she said. ♦
