Framing Classical Space

Author(s): Jean-Claude Lebensztejn

Source: Art Journal , Spring, 1988, Vol. 47, No. 1, The Problem of Classicism: Ideology
and Power (Spring, 1988), pp. 37-41
Published by: CAA

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/776904

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Framing Classical Space

By Jean-Claude Lebensztejn

M y aim is not to discuss the concept

of classicism, its historical or
transhistorical validity, its sources and
references, or its stylistic and thematic
features. It is to examine what might
constitute a classical work of art from
the viewpoint of one of of its components.
But this component, being no part of the
work, is unlike any other. I refer to the
frame. By frame, I mean not only the
material enclosure of a painting but also
the way it divides or relates the space of
the artwork to the space beyond it.
In a letter to his patron Chantelou,
dated April 28, 1639, about his painting
The Israelites Gathering the Manna,
Poussin wrote:

Once you have received your

painting, I beg you, if you think it
a good idea, to adorn it with some
framing, for it needs it; so that
when gazing at it in all its parts,
the rays of the eye are retained 1 own -nal o01 me 1 n Arronaissemenl, rarls,
and not scattered outside in the
course of receiving the especes ofpatron would order an exceedingly darkness." Notice how he presents this
the other neighboring objects splendid frame, and he wanted the urge as a natural constraint: this is a
which, being jumbled with the frame not to attract too much attention general tendency of classicism, espe-
depicted things, confuse the light to itself at the expense of the enclosed cially in the era of the rise of bourgeois
[or the space: confondent le jour]. painting; he also wished its color would thinking, which usually proposes its own
It would be very fitting that the unite "very sweetly" with the colors of order as universally given by nature.
said frame be gilded quite simply the painting instead of contrasting with The link between order and the frame
with mat gold, for it unites very them. Chantelou himself told Bernini is not restricted to Poussin. This sense of
sweetly with the colors without that "M. Poussin always requests that order has administrative and political
clashing with them.1 his paintings be given quite simple connotations as well. Compare, for
frames with no burnished gold."2 example, the section of a Paris town hall
What is surprising here is that Poussin But at the same time, Poussin wasinscribed: "Administrative posters / No
felt obliged to indicate that his painting sketching a theory of the classical trespassing upon the frames" with a
should be framed. Chantelou was a frame. And the theory was twofold.
knowledgeable amateur, the brother of a painting should be framed to
First,
the first editor of Leonardo's Trattato. avoid confusion between its objects and
No doubt, he would have framed his surrounding objects, between its own
painting anyway: it is the lack of a frame space and the space beyond it. This
that would have been exceptional in a separation is a landmark of classicism,
classical work of art. So Poussin must which aims at the values of order, clari-
have had something else on his mind. ty, and distinction. Poussin, a contempo-
It seems that he was advising Chan- rary of Descartes, wrote to Chantelou on
telou, not just to put a frame around his April 7, 1642: "My nature constrains
painting but to put a certain kind of me to seek and love well-ordered things,
frame: "gilded quite simply with mat shunning confusion, which is as adverse Fig. 2. Wall in New York City,
gold." Probably he suspected that his to me and opposite as is light to deep c. 1974.

Spring 198837
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New York wall of about ten years ago exceedingly simple, as the painting by
(Figs. I and 2). A rectangular frame so Cornelis Norberts Gijsbrechts repre-
strongly suggests the idea of norm and senting its own back (Fig. 7). This
of order that any exception is felt as painting was meant to be kept unframed
disruptive. Ingres's portrait of Made- and unhung, as though forgotten in a
moiselle Riviere, a combination of a corner, so that a passer-by would think it
rectangle and an arch, is displayed was the back of a painting, turn it over
today in the Louvre in its original frame; to see what it was about, and see the
but the official photographic section of same thing.
the National Museums in Paris keeps Of course, I do not mean to suggest
issuing a slide in which the frame has that there is a clear-cut opposition
been "normalized" (Figs. 3 and 4). between classical and baroque (or
The second point of Poussin's theory between classical and romantic, for that
is that the frame should be there, but not matter). One may find a baroque ele-
insistently there; it should not attract too ment, for example, in the way Poussin's
much attention to itself. Poussin's posi- Manna depicts a series of actions and
tion here recalls Kant's remark in ? 14 feelings that require time to occur in a
of his Critique of Judgment, discussed unified space. Le Brun, in a famous
by Derrida,3 that the frame is an orna- academic lecture, praised Poussin for
ment (parergon) of the work and this semiotic translation of time into
"wrongs true beauty." It also recalls Fig. 3. Ingres, Mademoiselle Riviere, space.6 But neoclassical theory (Less-
Degas's remark that "the frame is the 1805, oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 27 1/2". ing's Laokoon, for example) later
pimp of the painting: it highlights it, but Paris, Louvre. rejected this. Painting would have to
it ought never to shine at its expense." 4 concentrate on single states or
Poussin therefore defines a classical instantaneous actions.
conception of painting as a representa-
tion that establishes its own space as Classicizing theories of art insist on
specific and clearly separated from nat- the separateness of the artwork and
ural space; it does not emphasize this the dividing action of the frame. Classi-
separation, but presents it as given and cism, therefore, tends to be anti-illusion-
natural, not as constructed. The frame istic and anti-realistic. Of course, classi-
acts as a scaffolding: once it has helped cism can be quite realistic in the sense
to build the depicted space, it should intimated by William Childs in this
disappear as much as possible, so that issue of Art Journal, but even then, it
the depicted space appears naturally tends to keep the art space separated
self-contained. If the frame is too pres- from real space. In 1823, Quatremere de
ent, the separation does not appear natu- Quincy, who was the first editor of Pous-
ral; if it is too weak, the separation is sin's letters, wrote in his anti-romantic
threatened.

Both these unclassical strategies-

the insistent frame and the vanish-
ing frame-are evident in many ba-
roque paintings of Poussin's time,
sometimes even in the same work.
In the ceiling of the Gesu in Rome,
Baciccio built a heavy golden frame
transgressed by clouds carrying the Fig. 4 Mademoiselle Riviere, as the
souls, and by the falling damned. Con- portrait appears in slides issued by the
trary to Poussin's requirement, the Louvre.
frame is both indiscreet and crossed over
in such a way as to confuse the light or painted frame acts as a metaphor of an
the space. This is precisely the message oculus through which the philosopher
of the painting: the universality of the looks at the wall on which he is painted.
triumph of Jesus' name. The self-asser- The frame has to be emphatic-non-
tion of the frame is required for its neutral-to be the carrier of a play
transgression. This is not uncommon in between both levels.
Baroque systems of representation, as On the other hand, several paintings
may be seen in the etching from Johannof Poussin's time have no frame at all,
Andreas Pfeffel's 1731 Bible showing specifically in order to connect the space
the first day of Creation (Fig. 5). Thisof the painting with the space of reality:
kind of representational game existed I refer to the trompe-l'oeil. This can be
earlier, especially in the fifteenth cen-quite intricate, as, for example, the
tury, when painting still had to assertshaped canvas by Antoine Fort-Bras
itself as an equivalent of a window; that showing several artworks, a palette, and
is, before such an assertion appeared as the back of a painting on a painted easel,
given or natural. In Signorelli's picturewhich so confused and excited the Presi- Fig. 5. Johann Andreas Pfeffel, Bible,
of Empedocles in Orvieto (Fig. 6), the dent de Brosses half a century later,5 or 1731, Genesis 1.2, etching.

38 Art Journal
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ausgeschnittenes Bruchstuck] from the
optical showplace of the world." 0 The
opposition between the classical and the
romantic conceptions of the frame is
clear when we compare-as did Henri
Zerner and Charles Rosenl-itwo of the
illustrated editions of Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie: the 1806
neoclassical Didot edition, and the 1838
Curmer edition (Figs. 8 and 9). In the
Didot, one finds the features of a classi-
cal frame: a clear but discreet delinea-
tion with a single line around the image.
In the Curmer, especially in the numer-
ous vignettes, there is no frame at all,
and some confusion between text and
image. Notice particularly the b (first
letter and first word of the paragraph):
it is part of the wreck, as if it had been
drowned along with Virginie. Here we
find two typically romantic features: the
image conceived as a fragment and the
fusion between different systems of rep-
resentation.
The same opposition is to be found
within Grandville's Un autre monde,
published in 1844 (Figs. 10 and 11):
God's finger is a romantic parody of
romanticism. The colossal work is a
fragment, and the image of it is a fra
ment, a romantic vignette, as are all t
images in the book, except for those o
one chapter, "Une journee a Rhecula-
num," a neoclassical parody, in which
the illustrations are all treated in Flax-
man's style: a relief presentation and a
linear technique-even the shadows are
built with a series of parallel lines. And,
inevitably, one finds the framing line,
which is for Grandville the distinctive
feature of a classicizing style.

If we accept this conception of roman-

Fig. 6. Luca Signorelli, Empedocles, 1499-1504, fresco. Orvieto, Cathedral, San ticism as a tentative fusion between
Brizio Chapel.
art and life, between the depicted space
and the beholder's space, we may view
Essay on Imitation: vista!'" And again, in the same Salon, certain achievements of the avant-garde
apropos of Greuze's portrait of his wife:in the early twentieth century as a
When the painter encloses a vast
"Put the staircase between the portrait romantic aftermath. Schwitters's Merz
expanse in a narrow space, when
and yourself, look at it with a field glass,art and Mondrian's neoplastic art are
he leads me across the depths of
and you will see Nature herself; I defy both conceived as fragmentary; their
the infinite, on a flat surface, and
you to deny that this figure is alive andaim is the disappearance of art into life.
makes the air and light circulate
looking at you."8 In 1839, when Chev-What is not romantic in Mondrian is his
around flat appearances, I love to
reul discussed the frame, he declared itsvision of art as anti-individualistic, anti-
abandon myself to his illusions. tragic, and universal, as well as his
necessity, but at the same time con-
But I want the frame to be there; I
fessed that its presence was an obstacle emphasis on discontinuity rather than
want to know that what I see is in
to the illusion of the painting.9 fusion. Mondrian, if one can put it this
fact nothing but a canvas or an
Whereas baroque artists loved to play way, was classical in the present and
even field.7
with the limits between art and reality,romantic in the future. At the end of his
This is the opposite of Diderot's illusion-romantic artists tried to blur them-as life, he wrote to James Johnson
istic view of a seascape by Joseph Ver-much as classical ones aimed at separat- Sweeney:
net: "Look at the Port of La Rochelle ing them. A. W. Schlegel, in his lecturesSo far as I know, I was the first to
with a field glass that embraces the field on dramatic literature, compared classi- bring the painting forward from
of the picture but excludes the frame. cal tragedy to a sculpted group, and the frame, rather than set it within
Forgetting that you are examining a romantic drama to a large painting, and the frame. I had noted that a pic-
painted work, you will exclaim, as if you added: "Such a painting will be less ture without a frame works better
were on the top of a mountain, the perfectly limited than the group, for it isthan a framed one and that the
spectator of Nature herself: 'O the finelike a cut-out segment [or fragment: einframing causes sensations of three

Spring 1988 39
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dimensions. It gives an illusion of tually coming to an end is somewhat the
depth, so I took a frame of plain opposite of Ad Reinhardt's view of art-
wood and mounted my picture on as-art: "Art is art-as-art and everything
it. In this way, I brought it to a else is everything else. Art-as-art is
more real existence. nothing but art. Art is not what is not
To move the painting into our art." 13 Therefore, his black paintings
surroundings and give it real exis- are framed with a simple black frame
tence, has been my ideal since I ("The frame should isolate and protect
came to abstract painting.... I the painting from its surroundings" 14),
have studied the problem and and they are intended to be kept in a
practiced the approach with re- specific place, an art museum: "The one
movable color and non-color place for art-as-art is the museum of
planes in several of my studiosfine
in art.... A museum is a treasure-
fig. 7. Cornelis Norberts (Gijsbrechts, Europe, just as I have done herehouse
in and a tomb, not a counting-house
Trompe-l'oeil, c. 1670, oil on canvas, New York.'2 or amusement-center."'5 Reinhardt de
26 x 34". Copenhagen, Museum of Fine fined himself as a classicist: "Classicism
Arts. Mondrian's metaphysics of art as even-
is nothing but an aesthetic approach to
art. Classical art has nothing 'going
on.' "16 But he was a classicist with a
vengeance, and excess of any sort is
unclassical, especially an excess of clas-
sicism. And his pretense of making
again and again "the last painting which
anyone can make" 17 was a considerable
twist on his (classical) idea of timeless-
ness. The paradox of his black paintings
is that of an endless end.
In modern times, it is less the physical
presence or absence of a frame that
makes the painting classical or unclassi-
cal than the specificity and consistency
of the pictorial space. Brice Marden's
paintings could be called classical, not
only because of the Greek frame of
reference in, say, Thira (Fig. 12)-the
title, the post-and-lintel structure, the
colors-but also because of the specific-
ity of the plane. "Specific" is a word
that Marden uses a lot, and he likes "the
idea of the rectangle being very strong
/itg. S. nerre-raul vrua non, v irginia LOSt at Zea, irom rauion
etthe wall and looking very much like a
Didot edition. painting." 18 In that sense, his work is
anti-minimal. The absence of a frame
around his paintings has at least two
goals: it helps to relate the painting to
the wall, and it proves the strong speci-
ficity of the painting. A frame always
serves as physical evidence that the
painting is never self-sufficient, never
classical enough. One may think here of
Rousseau's drawing lesson, in the sec-
ond book of Emile,"9 where the crudest
drawings are kept in the most gilded and
pompous frames, while the better ones
need only a simple black one. The frame
here becomes the shame of art, the
perfection of which is denoted, converse-
ly, by the disappearance of the frame; if
not its absence, at least its invisibility.
Of course, one could argue that Mar-
den's paintings do have some kind of
frame: the frames of reference, the walls
they are on, the gallery or museum
space, the art criticism that frames them
as artworks. But these considerations
would bring us far from issues of classi-
Fig. 9. Eugene Isabey, "The Prayer of the Sailor," from Paul et Virginie, 1838cism.
Curmer edition.

40 Art Journal
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11 Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanti-
cism and Realism, New York, 1984, pp. 76-
77.

12 Piet Mondrian, to James Johnson Sweeney,

1943, in "Eleven Europeans in America," The
Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, XIII: 4-5
(1946), pp. 35-36. See: Jean-Claude Lebensz-
tejn, "Mondrian: la fin de l'art," Critique, 438
(November 1983), pp. 895, 903-5.

13 Ad Reinhardt, "Art-as-Art," Art International

(December 1962), pp. 36, 37; Art-as-Art, ed.
Barbara Rose, New York, 1975, pp. 53, 54.

14 Ad Reinhardt, "Twelve Rules for a New Acad-

emy," Art News (May 1957), p. 56; Art-as-Art
(cited n. 13), p. 206.

15 Reinhardt (cited n. 13).

16 Phyllisann Kallick, "An Interview with Ad

Reinhardt," Art International (December
1967), p. 271.

17 Bruce Glazer, "An Interview with Ad Rein-

hardt," Art International (December 1966), p.
Fig. 11 Grandville, "A Day in
Fig. 10 Grandville, "The Finger of Rheculanum," from Un Autre Monde,
18; Art-as-Art (cited n. 13), p. 13.
God," from Un Autre Monde, 1844. 1844. 18 Brice Marden, to Jean-Claude Lebensztejn,
"From," Brice Marden: Recent Paintings and
Notes 6 In Andre Felibien, Conferences de l'Academie Drawings, exh. cat., Pace Gallery, New York,
1 Correspondence de Nicolas Poussin, ed. C. royale de Peinture et de Sculpture pendant 1978, no pag.
Jouanny, Paris, 1911, pp. 20-21: "Quand vous l'annee 1667, "Sixieme conference," Paris,
aur6s repceu le vostre, je vous suplie, si vous le 1668; reprint Geneva, 1973. See: Jacques 19 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes,
trouv6s bon, de l'orner d'un peu de corniche, Thuillier, "Temps et tableau: la th6orie des Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, IV, pp. 398-99.
car il en a besoin, affin que en le consid6rans en 'p6rip6ties' dans la peinture francaise du XVIIe
toutes ses parties les rayons de l'oeil soient siecle, "Stil und Uberlieferung in der Kunst
retenus et non point espars au dehors en rece- des Abendlandes; Akten des 21. Internation-
puant les espeses des aultres obiects voisins qui alen Kongresses fur Kunstgeschichte in Bonn
venant pesle-mesle, avec les choses d6peintes 1964, Berlin, 1967, III, pp. 199-201. Jean-Claude Lebensztejn teaches art
confondent le jour. history at the University of Paris I. He
7 Antoine Chrysostome Quatremere de Quincy,
"II seroit fort a propos que ladite corniche fut is the author of Imiter sans fin/Le
Essai sur la nature, le but et les moyens de
dor6e d'or mat tout simplement, car il s'unit
l'imitation dans les beaux-arts, I, 14, Paris, Chant de l'aimable Angelette (1987).
tres-doucement avec les couleurs sans les
1823; reprint Brussels, 1980, p. 128.
offenser." See: Louis Marin, "Du cadre au
decor ou la question de l'ornement dans la 8 Denis Diderot, Salons; "Salon de 1763," s.v.
peinture," Rivista di estetica, 12 (1982), pp. "Vernet" (Le port de La Rochelle) and
18-20. "Greuze" (Portrait de Mme Greuze).

2 Philippe de Chennevieres, La peinture fran-9 Michel-Eugene Chevreul, De la loi du con-

qaise, p. 270; see: Correspondance (cited n. 1), traste simultane des couleurs ... ? 584, 1889;
p. 21 n. reprint Paris, 1969, pp. 288-89.

3 Jacques Derrida, "Parergon," La verite en 10 August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen uiber

peinture, Paris, 1978. dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 25th lecture
(1808); Kritische Schriften und Briefe, ed. E.
4 "Le cadre est le maquereau de la peinture; il la
Lohner, Stuttgart, 1967, VI, p. 112.
met en valeur, mais il ne doit jamais briller a
ses d6pens." Quoted in Jean A. Keim, "Le
tableau et son cadre," Diogene, 38 (1962), p.
111. I have not been able to trace the source of
Degas's remark, but it is a classical idea, to be
found in, among other places, Andre Felibien,
Des principes de l'architecture. s.v.
"Quadre," Paris, 1676, p. 712; Watelet and
Levesque, Dictionnaire des arts, s.v.
"Bordure," Paris, 1792, I, p. 261.

5 Charles de Brosses, Lettres familieres ecrites

d'Italie en 1739 et 1740, "M6moire sur Avig-
non." The painting can be seen today in the
Museum Calvet in Avignon; see: Georges de
Loye, "Le trompe-l'oeil d'Antoine Fort-Bras," Fig. 12 Brice Marden, Thira, 1979-80,
Revue des arts, Musees de France, 1960, I, pp. oil and wax on canvas, 96 x 180",
19-24; Miriam Milman, Le trompe-l'oeil, eighteen panels. Paris, Musee national
Geneva, 1982, p. 93 (color reproduction). d'art moderne.

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