How Painters Today Are Reframing… the Frame

·31 min·2 clips

Why are painters today making frames that demand attention, challenging centuries of tradition?

1. The Art Angle host Ben Davis interviews Artnet writer Katie White about her article 'Border Core,' examining the contemporary revival of the picture frame as artistic subject. 2. Katie White, who covers art history for Artnet News, brings detailed art-historical research alongside interviews with living artists including Stephanie Temmeheier, Kang Seung Lee, Valerie Hegarty, Holly Lane, and Almendra Bertoni. 3. The episode's core thesis is that contemporary painters are deliberately emphasizing and sculpturally expanding their frames at a moment when phone-mediated images have flattened art's physical dimensionality. 4. White traces the removable picture frame to 15th-century Europe, where secular art hung on domestic walls rather than serving as devotional objects — a shift that created the need for a portable border. 5. Earlier framing devices existed in Greco-Roman times as simple wooden buttressing, and flat fresco borders painted around sculptures show that the idea of a frame predates the physical object itself. 6. The ornate gilt frame was codified by the French salon by the 1800s — rectangular, gold-leafed — and even made mandatory as a rule of exhibition. 7. Industrialization in the mid-to-late 1800s replaced hand-carved gilt frames with mass-produced 'economical paste' assemblies, and at least one critic noted the disparity between artwork quality and frame quality at the salon of the 1860s. 8. The Nazarenes, a sect of German romantic artists, were among the first to reject ornate gilt frames and make their own; the pre-Raphaelites — including William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Millais — followed, painting gold leaf directly on visible wood grain. 9. In 1877, Degas and Pissarro showed works in white 'architrave-style' frames, while Monet, Mary Cassatt, and Berthe Morisot used simple colored frames in pink, red, or green — provoking an uproar, and often having their frames immediately replaced by buyers. 10. Degas closely guarded his own works and kept the original white frames; auction records show these frames being removed even in recent decades, while Impressionist paintings 'look great without a frame' in Davis's view. 11. Mid-20th-century modernism pushed the frame toward invisibility: German 'Bildschrager' (image carriers) — glass panes held by side clips — presented paintings floating without boundaries, though conservation issues meant the works would 'start to slip down.' 12. Post-war exhibitions in Europe in the 1940s removed classical Italian masterpieces from their historical frames and hung them in clip frames, a move some loved and others hated, making visible how embedded the gold frame had become in how audiences perceived those images. 13. Painter-sculptor Stephanie Temmeheier, whose frames include ceramic lobsters and rubber tires, argues that 'paintings are so flattened by the photographs that represent them, we can forget that objects possess a real presence,' and that sculptural frames 'reanimate' that presence on the wall. 14. New York artist Valerie Hegarty creates multimedia works that look like centuries-old ruined paintings — often involving the language of Manifest Destiny and Hudson River School — where a smashed frame forces viewers to perceive the whole object rather than a window into another world. 15. Korean-born Los Angeles artist Kang Seung Lee, who showed at the last Venice Biennale, builds plinth-like wooden frames that orient paintings horizontally rather than vertically, activating what White calls 'a relational understanding of the art object.' 16. Miami-born New York artist Almendra Bertoni creates pseudo-religious frames with doves and praying hands around surrealist paintings, describing the frame's objectness as stopping people who have shortened attention spans from scrolling. 17. The episode is structured as a collegial art-journalist conversation, with Davis contextualizing White's reporting against broader art history and White offering direct quotes from artists and close readings of specific works. 18. The tone is intellectually engaged and conversational, with both hosts comfortable making sweeping historical claims while acknowledging complexity — Davis uses the pre-Raphaelites' material concerns to push back on their reputation for 'fluffy subject matter.' 19. Listeners interested in contemporary painting, art history from Renaissance to Impressionism, or the intersection of digital culture and physical art objects will find this episode most rewarding. 20. Listeners wanting studio techniques, market analysis, or coverage of art outside the Euro-American painting tradition may find the focus narrow.

As heard by us

A crisp Art Angle episode on why painters are making the frame part of the work again.

The Art Angle turns the frame from background furniture into the subject, and the conversation is strongest when it treats that shift as a material issue rather than a gimmick.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want the frame to stop behaving like the background, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Art Angle