Monday, September 25, 2017

History of the Frames






A Brief History of the Frames Market

  • Photo of Diego Salazar’s Long Island City gallery by Abigail Cain.
    Photo of Diego Salazar’s Long Island City gallery by Abigail Cain.
The walls of Diego Salazar’s Long Island City gallery offer a mesmerizing lesson in frame history: sumptuously carved and gilded 17th-century French frames hang alongside their more austere Dutch relatives, with a sizable collection of gleaming 19th-century American examples housed in an adjoining room. Of the hundreds of frames on display, only a handful contain artworks—and, in fact, Salazar often negotiates with gallerists to purchase a particularly stunning frame sans painting.
A longtime collector and dealer of period frames, Salazar gestures to one designed by notable Beaux-Arts architect Stanford White hanging in his American gallery. “This frame was meant to be seen in candlelight,” he says, pointing out the wire mesh and the delicately patterned shadow it casts. Salazar bought it 15 years ago at auction for almost $50,000. “If I ever sell it, I could get $300,000 for it,” he says. “But I’ll never sell it.”
Considering the current price tag, it might be hard to believe that just three decades ago dealers were simply giving these frames away. Pioneering New York frame dealer Eli Wilner founded his business in 1983 and remembers major galleries like Knoedler, Kenneth Lux, and Hammer calling and offering him their unwanted frames for free. “I picked up my collection for nothing,” he said. “Literally nothing. And then, obviously, over the years I’ve had to pay for frames. But the first five years or so, they were just gifted to me. All I had to do was pick them up.”
Up to that point, frames were intended to reflect the tastes of the institution or the private collector. “Often paintings were reframed when they changed collectors because that’s the only way a collector can really put their mark on a piece of art,” Gene Karraker, conservator of frames at the J. Paul Getty Museum, noted. “And, if it’s a private collector, to ensure it matches the decor.” According to Wilner, in the past this reframing process happened every 30 years. “It’s almost a law,” he said. “Every generation there is a new sensibility about framing.”
Napoleon offers a particularly spectacular historical example—after assuming power in 1799, he ordered all the major works in the Louvrereframed. But 20th-century institutions also felt empowered to replace frames, a practice called “downframing” that was particularly prevalent in the 1980s. The Museum of Modern Art in New York put its antique frames in storage and replaced them with modern ones during that decade; in 1978, the Guggenheim transferred the museum’s Thannhauser collection to white shadow frames preferred by the director Thomas M. Messer.
  • Photos of Eli Wilner Gallery courtesy of Eli Wilner.
    Photos of Eli Wilner Gallery courtesy of Eli Wilner.
Many point to the work of German art historian Claus Grimm in the 1970s, particularly his study The Book of Picture Frames (1979), as the beginning of a modern scholarly interest in frames. But the topic gained real momentum in the mid-’80s and early ’90s with a string of frame-centric exhibitions: the Rijksmuseum in 1984, the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1990, and the National Portrait Gallery in 1996. By 1994, when Karraker first started working at the Getty, curators were already dedicated to matching each work with an appropriate period frame.
“Even at that point, the reasoning by the curators and the conservators is that when reframing was done, they wanted to fit the period of the frame with the period of the painting—either by country, by region, by date,” he recalled. “If there was a particular frame that an artist was known to use, that would influence the choice as well.”
The market for period frames grew as collectors started to follow suit. “Framing is now an international topic,” Wilner explained. “It comes up in seminars, it comes up in books, it comes up in discussions. So if you’re a buyer right now of a Rembrandt or a Frederick Church or a Norman Rockwell or a Hopper—yes, you’re very interested in how he would have framed it. You could choose not to follow what he or she did, but you want to know: How was it presented in their lifetime? It’s integral to the conversation. You can’t show me an institution or collector who’s serious that’s not addressing that.”
Even auction houses eventually joined in. “In the last 20 years, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the two powerhouses, have done a lot in terms of borrowing frames for exhibitions and highlighting them with labels,” Wilner continued. “Now, next to their $50 million painting, there’s a description of the frame. So that is an ongoing subtle but clear educational process.” It’s also an effective way for dealers to sell antique frames—Salazar said he regularly lends frames to auction houses. “It’s advertising, in a way,” he noted. “In fact, I just sold a frame that I lent for a Botticelli.”
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the rapidly growing market for period frames encouraged steadily rising prices. Now, “an antique frame can range from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the period and the style and the size,” Karraker said. “They’re not cheap.” This is due in part to the scarcity of original frames, which were often scrapped when styles changed. Wilner noted that during the Great Depression, for example, people would melt frames down for gold content—one reason that antique American frames are among the most expensive styles today.
  • Photo of Diego Salazar’s Long Island City gallery by Abigail Cain.
    Photo of Diego Salazar’s Long Island City gallery by Abigail Cain.
Despite higher prices overall, the value of a frame remains tied to the value of artwork from the corresponding period—and while modern and contemporary art has seen soaring prices over the last decade, older works have not had the same luck. According to the Mei Moses World All Art Index, between 2002 and 2012 post-war and contemporary art gained a compounded annualized rate of return of 11.6 percent. In the same period, Old Master paintings gained just 3.3 percent and American paintings only 1 percent. The recession hit the frame market particularly hard, according to Wilner. “The year 2008 was a horrible time for the industry and the 19th century got really hurt. Both European and American painting values plummeted,” he said.
Salazar has seen the number of antique frame sellers in the United States dwindling, down to around 9,000 from an original count of 20,000. “People just don’t want antiques anymore,” he noted. Although he follows industry developments, Salazar no longer supports himself through frame sales—instead, he uses real estate investments to fund what he describes as a “passion” rather than a business.
Wilner said the frame market has recovered somewhat since a particularly low point in 2013. “Thankfully, there’s renewed interest,” he said. But he says the industry is increasingly focused on lower price points, like works in the $20,000 to $100,000 range. “The buyers want to dress up their paintings to make them look like million-dollar objects, and they’re using the framing to do it. So it’s an interesting renaissance in framing interest, but not for the greatest masterpieces—more for the lesser works by great artists that want to look more interesting.”
“It’s almost like what was happening in the 1980s when I really began to encourage collectors and museums to reframe, but we were reframing masterpieces back then,” Wilner continued. “That same energy is being taken to the next level of paintings now. But I’m not sure masterpieces are around, maybe that’s the reason. Who would sell a masterpiece in this market if they didn’t have to?”
Wilner is already considering the legacy of his inventory, with ambitions to found a museum devoted entirely to period frames. Salazar has the same plan for his roughly 1,000-piece collection. And watching the dealer stroll through his Queens gallery, stopping momentarily to single out a frame once owned by Napoleon’s brother, it’s not difficult to imagine his collection in a museum—each frame finally recognized as a work of art in its own right.

—Abigail Cain

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The Latin American Women Artists Who Fought Patriarchy with Their Bodies





The Latin American Women Artists Who Fought Patriarchy with Their Bodies

  • Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints), 1972. Courtesy of the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, and Galerie Lelong, NY.
    Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints), 1972. Courtesy of the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, and Galerie Lelong, NY.
In the decades following 1960, the dictatorships and authoritarian regimes dominating most of Latin America reinforced the dependent role of women, while institutionalizing inequality. Within this context, the human body took center stage for many female artists. Their experimental works—often favoring video, photography, and performance—introduced a shift in representations of the female form, while questioning patriarchal structures and regional politics.
Despite this, few of these artists would have referred to their work as “feminist.” Instead of a desire to advocate for women, their sensibilities were heavily shaped by the revolutionary struggle and the widespread resistance of their respective countries—even if their works did reflect a repertoire of issues addressed by feminism, such as motherhood, civil rights, and sexual violence.
“Many of these artists were active in left-wing movements,” explains Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, co-curator of the exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. “But for them, the rights of women were secondary, and the Left considered that feminism was bourgeois and imperialistic.”
  • Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Passing Through, Sonnabend Gallery, 1977. Courtesy of Babette Mangolte and BROADWAY 1602 HARLEM, New York.
    Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Passing Through, Sonnabend Gallery, 1977. Courtesy of Babette Mangolte and BROADWAY 1602 HARLEM, New York.
“Radical Women” is part of “Pacific Standard Time: LA / LA,” the city-wide celebration of Latin American and Latinx art. Featuring over 100 artists from 15 countries, the show was born out of an ambition to provide a more complex history of the region. Curators Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta have examined the notion of the political body through highlighting the works of familiar artists like Lygia Pape, Ana Mendieta, and Beatriz González, as well as a host of unclassifiable, lesser-known names, like the Cuban-born Zilia Sánchez, the Colombian sculptor Feliza Bursztyn, and the New York-born Puerto Rican photographer Sophie Rivera.
“The works of these women contribute to making visible the potentiality of the body, and how you can reframe the notion of the body,” says Giunta, gesturing to photographic works by Mendieta from 1972. In the pictures, the Cuban-born artist is seen pressing different parts of her body against a glass pane, morphing the canonical idea of the feminine body into grotesque or unnatural states. “It has to do with emancipation,” Giunta continues, “and the reconceptualization of the body, which is a political process.”
  • Ana Mendieta, Rape Scene, 1973. Courtesy of the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, and Galerie Lelong, NY.
    Ana Mendieta, Rape Scene, 1973. Courtesy of the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, and Galerie Lelong, NY.
  • Sonia Gutiérrez, Y con unos lazos me izaron (And they lifted me up with a rope), 1977. Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia.  © Sonia Gutiérrez. Courtesy of the artist.
    Sonia Gutiérrez, Y con unos lazos me izaron (And they lifted me up with a rope), 1977. Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia.  © Sonia Gutiérrez. Courtesy of the artist.
In another poignant work by Mendieta, Untitled (Rape Scene) (1973),comprising five color photographs, we see the artist bent abjectly over a desk, with blood dripping down her buttocks and thighs. Originally staged as a performance, the confrontational work was a response to a fatal rape that had taken place at the University of Iowa, where Mendieta studied. By recreating the aftermath of a violent assault, the artist represents defenselessness and invites the viewer to take a stand.
Violence is also palpable in the paintings of Sonia Gutiérrez, which denounce acts of torture, picturing anonymous bodies bound in ropes and bonds of fabric. Using thick contours filled in with flat color fields, her vision of Pop Art opposes the banality of the message (an approach that is not dissimilar to that of Beatriz González). Nearby, three black-and-white self-portraits from 1974 show the Italian-Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino attempting to cut off her own tongue and nose, hinting at the omnipresent violence in Brazil during the dictatorship (1964–85). (Maiolino also currently has a retrospective up at MOCA, Los Angeles.)
Issues of race and ethnicity are most striking in a video by Victoria Santa Cruz.  A leading figure of Afro-Peruvian culture, this choreographer, composer and activist started the first black theater company in Peru, in the late 1950s. “Negra! Negra! Negra!” shouts the troupe of musicians in the background of Me Gritaron Negra (1978), while she recounts becoming aware of her skin color as a child. This poem went on to become a hymn of empowerment across the continent.  
  • Victoria Santa Cruz, Me gritaron negra (They shouted black at me), 1978. Video documentation of performance, excerpted from the documentary Victoria - Black and Woman (1978). Courtesy of OTA-Odin Teatret Archives and the Hammer Museum.
    Victoria Santa Cruz, Me gritaron negra (They shouted black at me), 1978. Video documentation of performance, excerpted from the documentary Victoria - Black and Woman (1978). Courtesy of OTA-Odin Teatret Archives and the Hammer Museum.
Where the majority of these artists did not set out to make feminist works, those working in Mexico (which wasn’t immersed in a dictatorship) were exceptions. Mexico’s feminist art movement emerged in the late 1970s, led by the likes of Mónica Mayer, Maris Bustamante, and Magali Lara.
“There were many artists who presented feminist works,” explains Mayer, who studied at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles with Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus. “We organized many exhibitions, wrote and published magazines.…I think that’s why we were seen as more organized.”
In 1983, Mayer and Bustamante started the first feminist art collective in Mexico: Polvo de Gallina Negra (“Black Hen Powder”). For 10 years, the pair produced experimental and subversive works questioning the role of women in Mexican society, their image in mass media, and the impact of machismo. In the video Madre por un día (1987), they appear on the national television program Nuestro Mundo, persuading celebrity presenter Guillermo Ochoa to don their set of aprons and prop pregnant-bellies to take part in the female experience.
Beyond Latin America, crucial to this dialogue are the Chicana and Latina artists who were working in the United States at the time. “Usually the Latin American and the Latina / Chicana art worlds are kept separate, which is an artificial, colonial construct,” Fajardo-Hill argues. “Latina and Chicana artists were responding not only to patriarchal politics that were as oppressive as those faced by their counterparts in Latin America, but also to a second-wave feminism that was often indifferent to the issues faced by women of color.”
  • Mónica Mayer, El tendedero (The clothesline), 1979. Courtesy of Mónica Mayer.
    Mónica Mayer, El tendedero (The clothesline), 1979. Courtesy of Mónica Mayer.
Among those featured in “Radical Women” are artist and activist Judith F. Baca, a central figure of the Chicano art movement, who was responsible for the Great Walls of Los Angeles murals (begun in 1974); the Chilean-American performance artist Sylvia Palacios Whitman, a pioneer of performance art in 1970s New York, best known for donning giant green hands; and the relatively unknown Bronx-born photographer Sophie Rivera, whose black-and-white pictures document the lives of Puerto Rican, working-class communities of New York.
At a time when Latin America is facing an increasing rate of femicide, and the United States are observing some of the most repressive immigration policies in decades, the teachings of these artists are critical.
“When you see that these women are being empowered, that they’re present, and they’re saying important things—these are important references for the next generation,” Fajardo-Hill notes, and adds that women still only make up around 30 percent of artists represented in galleries and museums. “We need to move forward not by excluding, but by including all these voices.”

—Benoît Loiseau

How the Latest Paul Manafort Revelations Fit with Trump’s Business Model






How the Latest Paul Manafort Revelations Fit with Trump’s Business Model

Trump Organization executives spent years making deals while having no reason to imagine that they would ever face scrutiny. What e-mails and documents are out there for Mueller to find?
Photograph by Patrick Fallon / ZUMA Wire / Alamy
Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that Paul Manafort, when he was running Donald Trump’s campaign last year, sought to use his position to curry favor with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin. Manafort also, it appears, considered the campaign an opportune time to try to convince unnamed people who owed him money to finally pay him back. In response to this news, Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer in charge of representing President Trump in matters related to the Russia investigation, told Bloomberg’s Margaret Talev, “It would be truly shocking” if Manafort “tried to monetize his relationship with the President.”
Cobb’s shock is, surely, of the “Casablanca” variety. Manafort’s personal profit-seeking is, if anything, a rather tepid example of the kind of activity that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, might find as he continues to investigate those in Trump’s orbit. I have been reporting on the Trump Organization for the past year, and, the more work I’ve done, the more it has become clear that allowing hangers-on to monetize their relationship with him was, essentially, Trump’s business model.
The Trump Organization, as it has been described to me by more than a dozen people who have worked for it, was nothing like a typical, hierarchical corporation. The company’s central office was tiny and comprised a few dozen people, including Trump, his children, and some close associates, whose collective experience was largely limited to New York, Miami, and a few other American cities. When the company began aggressively pursuing international deals, over the past decade, it relied on a loose grouping of people who were authorized—formally or not—to travel around the world seeking deals in Trump’s name. Pocketing a little for themselves on the side was part of the arrangement.
According to the sources I’ve spoken with, the Trump Organization was shockingly lax in its due-diligence procedures. It seemed willing to do business with pretty much anybody, no matter his background. (Several Trump officials told me the key criterion was insuring that the potential partner could pay.) This was how Trump ended up doing business with the Mammadov family, in Azerbaijan, for example, whose members were publicly suspected by U.S. officials of partnering with a likely front company for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. A Trump project in Georgia was undertaken with a company that had become entangled in one of the greatest bank frauds in history. A Trump partner in Indonesia, Hary Tanoesoedibjo, has been investigated for corruptionand for ties to violent and anti-American Islamists. The list could go on.
Manafort was a central figure in Trump’s world for only a few months. Mueller has been interested enough in him to take the extraordinary step of convincing a judge to authorize a “no knock” warrant, allowing F.B.I. agents to raid Manafort’s home in search of documents and other evidence. Typically, complex white-collar investigations begin with the arrests of the people whose possible crimes are easiest to prove and who seem most likely to “flip” and testify against higher-up figures.
A handful of Trump Organization executives—including Trump’s own children, Michael Cohen, who is now Trump’s private attorney, and Jason Greenblatt, who is now a White House official advising on the Middle East—spent many years making deals while having no reason to imagine that they would ever face the kind of scrutiny they are currently under. What e-mails and other documents are out there for Mueller to find? What financial records exist that disclose the flow of funds into the Trump Organization? Given their surprising connections to people likely to be actively working with the Kremlin, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and others hostile to the interests of the United States, what intelligence recordings are there?
One of Trump’s lawyers, Jay Sekulow, told me recently that he believes that Mueller is not authorized to investigate Trump’s private businesses or any dealings outside of Russia. He and the rest of Trump’s legal team surely hope that Mueller’s targeting of Manafort ends there. After all, Manafort ran Trump’s campaign and had known connections to Russian figures, and Mueller is looking for evidence of Russian meddling in the election. But there is much evidence to suggest the opposite—that this is no ending, just a beginning. Trump himself has made little distinction between his business and his political career. Cohen, for example, sought to enlist Vladimir Putin’s office’s help in developing a Trump Tower Moscow in 2016, just before the start of the primary season. It is inconceivable that everyone involved in foreign deals at the Trump Organization will not also be aggressively investigated. It also would be consistent with investigative best practices for Mueller to build toward those core figures by compiling a complete picture from people with less loyalty to the President, and for him to approach the core targets only once he is armed with ample evidence of any possible wrongdoing.
It should shock nobody, least of all Trump’s own lawyer, that people close to the President tried to monetize their relationship with him. There are dozens of people who could fit this description. Every single one of them, surely, is looking at the news about Manafort being woken up by F.B.I. agents rushing into his bedroom. His past dealings are being publicized all over the world; his future is on the line. Mueller is showing all these people the harder way to do things. Surely, they realize that there is also an easier way: they can proactively volunteer information to assist Mueller in his investigation.
  • Adam Davidson is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
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