How the West Was Hung by Matt Lembo

INSIDE SoA: Oklahoma é Prix de West é Lowy Frames é Women of the West JUNE 2013

HOW THE WEST WAS Lowy Frame and Restoring re-examines how frames express the art and soul of a painting. By Deborah Davis

Pre-reframing

C.M. Russell (1864-1926), War Party, recently reframed by Lowy in a period early-20thcentury carved and gilded American Arts and Crafts panel frame. Private collection, Texas.

arry Shar measures progress by looking at the past. Surrounded by a vast collection of magnificent frames from every imaginable time period, the president of Julius Lowy Frame and Restoring—the oldest and most venerable institution of its kind in America—and a veritable frame museum, sees history in every nook and cranny: here, a 17th-century Italian cassetta; there, an 18th-century French Regence; and on the wall, an ebonied Dutch masterpiece. Each of these frames has a tale to tell, but of late, the story that calls out to Shar from Lowy’s gilded storerooms is decidedly American. It is one that evokes thoughts of saddles, spurs and prairies; of mavericks and visionaries; and most of all, of the indefatigable pioneer spirit. Shar has been contemplating cowboy art, especially the masterful depictions of the Old West created by artists Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. Part of what makes these paintings so interesting is that they are experiencing a new wave of popularity (and attendant sky-high prices) among a discerning group of contemporary collectors. But Shar is also fascinated by the ongoing saga of the frames that surround these quintessentially American works. Just as rising and falling hemlines seem to chart the vicissitudes of the stock market, how the West was hung—and rehung—tells the larger story of how and why private collectors and museums have changed their approach to framing and conservation, and achieved a new level of connoisseurship, when it comes to the pursuit of the perfect work of art. A little background. We’ve all seen cowboy art, the almost

Jose, a Lowy craftsman for more than 20 years, hand carving an Arts & Crafts frame.

Lowy Frame and Restoring in New York is the oldest and largest fine arts services firm in America, specializing in art conservation and framing since 1907. Here is a glimpse at the intricate process of framing—from carving to gilding to matting—cowboy art in both the style and the spirit in which it was made.

Pre-reframing

Gibson Glass of Lowyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fitting Department and Lowy President Larry Shar review Charlie Russellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Kicking over the Morning Coffee Pot in both the pre-reframing and post-reframing stages.

C.M. Russell (1864-1926), Keeoma, framed in a Lowy crafted carved and gilt Arts and Crafts cove frame replicated from an original C.M. Russell frame design, first decade of the 20th-century at the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Opposite: Keeoma may have been framed in a mid-20th-century gold leaf French 18th-century Louis XIII style reproduction frame with linen liner. Private collection, Texas.

Technicolor depictions of man, animals and nature in the Old West. In fact, legendary Hollywood film director John Ford showed Remington’s paintings to his art directors and cinematographers to help them design appropriate looks for iconic Westerns such as Stagecoach and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. From the 1880s on, two of the most celebrated artists working in the genre were Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. They used their paintbrushes to create an evocative vision of the American frontier at a time when it was still uncharted, exotic, mythic and, ironically, about to disappear forever. In magazine and newspaper illustrations, drawings, paintings and sculptures, the artists showed viewers, usually for the first time, unimaginable vistas of mountains, prairies, and other natural wonders, as well as scenes of everyday life in the West—from campfires, cattle drives and combat to buffalo hunts and Native American rituals. Remington and Russell embraced the myth of the American West and promoted it in their work, turning the everyday cowboy into an iconic American folk hero, a Western-garbed knight of the round table. They were very successful. But as their careers progressed, both men

longed to be recognized as real artists, not just illustrators, so they put brush to canvas, memorializing the West they had known—and, to some extent, invented—with vivid oils and watercolors. Remington worked out of a studio in New York, while Russell settled in Montana, where he remained for the rest of his life. Part of being a “real” artist at the turn of the 20th century was recognizing the significance of the picture frame. For Remington and Russell, Arts and Crafts frames that had a certain artisanal feel were the order of the day. “Most of the original frames I’ve seen on Remingtons and Russells tend to be somewhat simple—not overly decorative,” observes curator and Western art expert Rick Stewart. Both artists used frames that actually incorporated Western themes, or ones that looked appropriately rustic, to complement their art. Russell’s masterwork Before the White Man Came, an elegiac scene of an Indian chief and his braves staring into the distance, was surrounded by a bronze frame ornamented with chevrons and arrowheads. In the early days both artists used frames patenated with bronze powder, “probably due to cost,” explains Stewart.

Pre-reframing

C.M. Russell (1864-1926), Invocation to the Sun, recently reframed by Lowy in a period early20th-century carved and gilded American Arts and Crafts ogee textured panel frame. Private collection, Texas.

And both artists experimented with the use of ebonized frames; Remington famously on many of his moody “nocturne” paintings. “Remington was involved in choosing his own frames,” adds Stewart, “but Russell seems to have left it to his wife, Nancy.” The Western art that was so admired when Remington and Russell were alive found enthusiastic new fans in the 1940s and 1950s among wealthy, self-made men whose heroes had always been cowboys. They were wildcatters, oilmen and cattlemen such as Sid Richardson and Thomas Gilcrease; Amon Carter, publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram; Cyrus Rowlett Smith, aviation pioneer and the head of American Airlines. These titans and modern-day mavericks felt a kinship with the knights-errant of the American West and turned to their works when they wanted manly art to display in their offices, studies and hunting lodges—art that underscored their masculinity and linked them to cowboys and the fabled frontiers of the past. Shar remembers cowboy art as being extremely popular when he first started working alongside his father, Hilly Shar, at Lowy in the 1960s. The art world was a small and congenial fraternity back then, Shar recalls with nostalgia. Father and son spent their Saturdays going from gallery to gallery, talking to dealers and collectors. Business was

conducted face-to-face, ideas were exchanged in lively conversations, and lifelong friendships were formed over splendid lunches in multistarred restaurants (cocktails definitely included). At the time, Rudy Wunderlich at Kennedy Galleries, Jack Bartfield at J.N. Bartfield, and Jimmy Graham at James Graham Gallery were the top dealers of Western art. Hilly Shar worked with all of them, and also traveled throughout the country framing Western art for both private collectors and museums. Several top collectors, including Richardson, Gilcrease, and Carter, ultimately founded their own art museums to showcase their Remingtons and Russells. Whether Hilly was on assignment at one of their eponymous institutions, or at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, or the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana, when it came time to select a frame, historical accuracy or aesthetic appropriateness was rarely a consideration. The “gold standard” in framing at the time was, in fact, gold. A glimmering, ornately carved Louis XIV, XV, or XVI made a painting look more important, was the prevailing sentiment, especially among dealers who wanted to attract rich collectors. As for the collectors themselves, men with the Midas touch preferred ornate gilded edges

for their beloved cowboy art. One of the most active cowboy art collectors in New York City, “21” Club owner Pete Kriendler, commonly known as “Mr. Pete,” followed this “golden” rule. He knew that the powerbrokers who happily dropped hundreds of dollars on a single bottle of Petrus and a giant steak at his famous restaurant felt perfectly at home surrounded by testosteroneinfused Remingtons in their gilded frames. The paintings exuded masculinity and money at the same time. “Clients wanted French frames,” Shar explains, “because, it was a way of aggrandizing the paintings. But it really had nothing to do with the aesthetic of the artwork.” He remembers a certain French, 18th-century Louis XIV-style frame. “It was so widely used on Western art that whenever a cowboy painting came in, we’d say, ‘Let’s put the 222 (the frame’s model number), on it.’” As for the colorful images within these storied French frames, when they showed signs of age (as they inevitably did decades after they were created), they were handily restored to their former glory. The prevailing wisdom was that every painting should look spanking new—better than before, even—as if the artist had just finished putting on the paint. And if a canvas showed signs of sagging or losing elasticity, a wax lining was applied to the back to restore its youthful form. “The concept of ‘conservation’ did not yet exist,” Shar explains. Instead, restorers did just that—restored—using their wits, seat-of-the-pants intuitions, and available materials to erase signs of age and wear. Some of the solutions were invasive and ended up being worse than the original problems (for example, wax discolored as it aged and made the canvas brittle). “There was not a lot of science in the old days,” Shar points out, “and we didn’t have organizations dedicated to researching materials and proper techniques the way we do today.” Framing and restoration issues aside, cowboy art enjoyed a goodbetter-best trajectory on the market during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The ’70s oil boom sparked a veritable Western art “gold rush” that picked up momentum with every passing year. In 1982 The New York Times suggested that the boom market was fueled by “Energy Growth and Egos,” citing rich oil executives from the West and the Southwest as the biggest buyers. These tycoons were “New Age cowboys,” chimed in the Chicago Tribune, on “a stampede for the artifacts of frontier America.” In 1999 a moody winter scene by Remington titled A Reconnaissance, broke all records for the artist when it sold for a staggering $5,172,500. High prices proved that cowboy art was serious business. It was now time to take a closer look at how the West was hung. Fortuitously, there was a new movement afoot in the land of frames and framing, and Lowy was in the vanguard. “When I started researching Remington and Russell frames around 1986-87, nobody really thought about what an original Remington or Russell frame looked like,” recalls Rick Stewart. “Larry Shar was probably one of the very few people who even thought about it.” As Shar elaborates, “the eyes of the art world were becoming much more sophisticated.” He continues, “We started looking at the paintings the way the artists looked at them, determining what is historically correct. And we realized that the most important consideration in selecting the best frame is to respect the integrity of the artwork.” Framers, curators, and ultimately collectors started re-examining historical frames, and they liked what they saw. They were committed to using frames to express the art and soul of a painting.

When, in the late 1970s, the Frederic Remington Art Museum invited Lowy to return for a groundbreaking project, they wanted the paintings that had been framed in the 1950s and the 1960s reunited with their original frames. Fortunately, those originals were safely stored, waiting patiently for the moment when they would come back into fashion. The Amon Carter Museum gave new life to its Western art collection by ordering period frames and Arts and Crafts reproduction frames from Lowy to replace all those Louis “222’s.” And the Sid Richardson Museum took bold steps by removing the fancy French frames from its Remingtons and Russells and using more appropriate replacements. “Russell was a self-taught artist with a certain naïve quality,” Shar points out. “His paintings never needed a frame made for a king.” The widespread re-framing of cowboy art was a real eye-opener. Museum visitors who had been blind or indifferent to the genre’s charms were noticing—and appreciating—the paintings for the first time. In the new millennium, Remington’s and Russell’s masterful depictions of the Old West continue to be coveted by 1-percenters who identify with America’s legendary frontier and the men who made it great. Trevor ReesJones, a modern-day financial titan, is one of them. When the Dallas entrepreneur amassed his impressive collection of Remingtons and Russells over the last decade, he determined that a really good painting required a really good frame. He presented Lowy with the challenging task of reframing 25 to 30 works in a relatively short period of time. Most of the paintings had been edged with lower-grade reproductions, or the ubiquitous French frames. Working with Rick Stewart, the collection’s curator, the Lowy team, including R. Wayne Reynolds (who had worked on similar projects for the Amon Carter and Sid Richardson museums), quickly found—and, in some cases, fabricated—frames that enhanced the paintings by celebrating their Western roots instead of denying them. The result? A harmonious marriage of frame and image that would make Remington and Russell proud. Shar, who has witnessed several generations of framing trends come and go, applauds the higher level of connoisseurship in the art world today. “Framing used to be a purely decorative decision,” he says. “The impulse was to make the painting fit the fancy room. Now, the knowledge of what is historically correct informs our aesthetic choices, giving us the freedom to abandon formulas—no more ‘bring out #222!’—and select frames that bring each picture to life.” What accounts for the shift in thinking? Education and advances in science, suggests Shar. “Fifty years ago we had restorers, now we have conservators,” he says, by way of example. “Restorers had innate wisdom, but they didn’t have the scientific knowledge that has become available in the past 50 years. Schools opened up, professional organizations were created for turning the craft of restoration into the science of conservation.” With this information came a new appetite for historical accuracy, in framing and in conservation. “A painting has a right to get older,” Shar maintains. “We should learn to live with imperfections as long as they are not compromising the structural integrity of the work. Today, paintings look more natural if they inhabit their own skin. Too much work can make a piece look unnatural. In art, as in life, subtlety is everything,” he observes. Cowboy art benefited greatly when “old” became “new,” and Shar finds it noteworthy that the pendulum has swung so far, so quickly. At the beginning of his career he was removing the original frames from Remingtons and Russells. Now, he is putting them back where they

Pre-reframing

Frederic Remington (1861-1909), The Scouting Party, recently reframed by Lowy in a period early-20th-century carved and gilded American Arts and Crafts chiseled cove frame by the NY /Chicago frame maker Newcomb-Macklin company. Private collection, Texas.

belong. “I think authenticity of the artist’s vision—which often included the frame—is important to collectors today,” says Stewart. “I hear about it from them all the time now.” Just as the collectors of cowboy art are often romantics who harbor idealistic notions about the Old West, Shar wistfully remembers the golden days of the art business, a time when prices ended in fewer zeroes, when techniques were more seat-of-the-pants than scientific, and when frames were sometimes choices that would never be repeated today. When he was starting out, the business was more collegial, he remembers. Shar could stroll from one gallery to another with a blockbuster painting casually tucked under his arm. That world, like the Old West, may be gone forever. Yet great framers—like great art—adapt. Without losing the personal touch that is the hallmark of the artisanal, family-owned company, Lowy has embraced the future. Every generation has its mavericks, and at Lowy, Brad Shar, Larry’s son and Hilly’s grandson, has placed his own 21st-century mark on the company by working with IBM to develop the Lowy Scan, a revolutionary digital program that enables clients to view

virtual frames from the Lowy inventory on their works of art. In fact, this process has been used to find the ideal frame for many a Remington and Russell. Standing on a frontier of their own, the Shars are finally able to frame—and conserve—cowboy art in both the style and the spirit in which it was made.

Deborah Davis is the author of Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner that Shocked a Nation (Atria, 2012); The Oprah Winfrey Show: Reflections on an American Legacy (Abrams, 2011); Gilded: How Newport Became the Richest Resort in America (Wiley, 2009); The Secret Lives of Frames: 100 Years of Art and Artistry (Filipacchi Publishing, 2007); Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball (Wiley, 2006); and Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X (Tarcher/Putnam, 2003).