A Newsletter Published By Julius Lowy Frame & Restoring Company, Inc. 223 East 80th Street, New York, NY 10021, 212 - 861 - 8585 |
Above: Detail of “Seige of Yorktown (1781)” after conservation;
Ruxandra Stoicescu filling losses on a section of the painting.
Lowy faced several unique challenges when it was called upon to restore a massive 14-foot by 17-foot oil painting of a battle scene from the American Revolution. The painting is a version of “Siege of Yorktown (1781),” a circa 1836 oil painting by the French Romantic painter Louis-Charles Auguste Couder depicting George Washington and French commanders after the victory at Yorktown, which hangs in the Battles Gallery at Versailles chateau in France. Couder’s painting was based on an eponymous 1784 gouache executed for King Louis XVI by Louis- Nicholas van Blarenberghe, a professional painter of battle and campaign scenes for the French army.
The version that came to Lowy, which is approximately the same size and composition as the Couder original, was likely created as a presentation piece and offered as a gift to either an individual or an institution. But it was hardly in presentable condition
when it arrived folded, wrinkled and torn. Its huge scale was a significant hurdle to the three-month conservation process, which warranted inventive solutions to facilitate handling and treatment. First, Lowy’s conservation team built an extension to the already large vacuum-hot table used for other painting conservation jobs. The canvas was then laid out on the table for cleaning by Marlene Raedisch and Sebastian Deregibus, who walked across the surface of the painting on a thick foam mat, removing dirt
layers and remnants of natural resin varnish with appropriate detergents and solvents. “Many areas were very brittle, rippled and had a lot of tears,” says Marlene. “So the biggest challenge was not to damage the painting further by walking on it, which is not a typical concern. Also, the varnish remnants that showed up in some of the dark tones of the image had to be cleaned more delicately so as not to disturb the pigments beneath.” continued on page 2
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By the end of the first quarter of the 20th-century, as modern art rebelled against tradition, the frame evolved into more than a decorative enclosure and took on a bold, new artistic identity of its own. The massproduced, cast and gilded frames of the 19th-century, and the richly carved and gilded Arts-and-Crafts frames that followed, gave way in the modern period to simpler, more rustic frames with minimal carving and gilding, a look that better complemented modern artworks. Artists themselves, sometimes in collaboration with small artist-run frame workshops, experimented with new materials and techniques to make frames that served as either an extension or reflection of their art and ideas. From the early 20th-century onward, artists such as Max Kuehne and Charles Prendergast in New York City and Frederick Harer and his apprentice, Bernard Badura, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, created frames both for themselves and other artists. Crafted of handshaped wood and then often hand-carved, these frames were usually sparely ornamented and finished with hand-applied gesso and distressed gold, silver or palladium leaf. They combined the quality craftsmanship of the Arts and Crafts era with innovative designs that reflected European frame making traditions and, in the case of Badura, the new streamlined aesthetic of Art Deco and modernist architecture. The naïve, home-crafted approach to frame making was developed further in the 1930s through 1950s by artists like Marsden Hartley and John Marin, who treated the frame as an extension and integral component of their modernist paintings, which often spilled onto the frame surface itself. Marin’s stark flat frames amplified |
 Above: Doris Lee's “Basket of Lilacs” with Lowy reproduction carved and painted frame. |
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| the abstract, geometric forms and whimsical colors in his paintings. Hartley, who worked closely with the noted New York framing company The House of Heydenryk, preferred minimalist frames with a flat, wide border painted the color of the wall or canvas. Other modern artists such as Milton Avery, William Glackens, Max Weber, Thomas Hart Benton and Georgia O’Keeffe also experimented with designing and making their own frames. Benton designed a streamlined rounded molding for his murals that mirrored the curves of his figurative compositions, while O’Keeffe favored a unique “clam shell”, silver-leafed frame design that echoed the clean, rounded forms in her paintings. Eugene Ludins, an artist-frame maker from Woodstock, New York, worked in a provincial style that incorporated notch carvings, rough surface textures and silver leaf, which endowed his frames with a personal, less commercial look. Mid-century frames also incorporated new materials and techniques. Woods such as driftwood ( continued on page 4)
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