The word “frame” possesses an interesting history. Originally from the Old English framian, the word meant “to benefit, make progress”; in Middle English its meaning as framen was extended to include “construct.” From there it assumed the noun form that art historians know but do not necessarily consider with the same care as the painting that rests inside its borders.

Eli Wilner reverses this trend. In The Gilded Edge: The Art of the Frame, he has gathered together scholars, curators, and framers to outline a new field of collecting and study. As Wilner writes in his introduction to these ten essays, the “connoisseurship of American picture frames has been negligible” (11). And he depicts himself as a pioneer of sorts. Recognizing in the 1980s the potential value of his own collection, Wilner established the Eli Wilner & Company frame dealership in 1983. The Gilded Edge, he writes, has been a “dream…for more than twenty years” (11). Like the American collectors of the Gilded Age who methodically went about the business of collecting and cataloguing, buying and (sometimes) selling, Wilner’s interest in frames is both scholarly and financial. It has always been thus in the world of fine and decorative arts. American antique frames, in the title of Wilner’s introduction, must be a “lost art” in order to assess their economic and aesthetic value.

Wilner reasons, erroneously, that period frames as works of art have not been adequately explored because it is “objects that are written about and exhibited in museums [that] end up having value to society, both aesthetic and financial” (11). But paintings exhibited in museums are usually framed, so frames are displayed and sometimes even labeled. Wilner’s basic point—the very juxtaposition of the treasured artwork and the “invisible” frame, the former studied, the latter ignored both as an important element and as a work in and of itself—is a telling one. The theoretical and methodological inroads of material-culture studies in the 1970s and 1980s (and of cultural studies since) may have broadened the types of artifacts studied, but the very frameworks in which students learn of art and artifacts in the United States remain constituted in great part within Western and historical canons of taste and refinement that are reinforced in the ways in which museums display objects and in the ways scholars teach them. For example, Jules David Prown’s seminal essay, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method” (Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (spring 1982): 1–19), attempts to categorize objects, but because Prown relies heavily on art-historical analysis, these categories are not demotic but ranked, with works of art the first order. All others, it seems, fall into the “utilitarian trap,” and as such are not the works of genius for study and as evidence of culture. The very application of methodologies of formal analysis and other art-historical inquiry to other types of artifacts widens the field, but reinforces traditional disciplinary dependency on formal analysis, which is itself dependent on Western canons of intellectual and aesthetic thought. The much-vaunted interdisciplinarity of material-culture studies may have been, in practice, “interartifactuality.” And in a world of fine and decorative arts and everything else remade by eBay and The Antiques Roadshow, what constitutes value has now become a much more complicated formula.

How frames became “invisible” is implicated but not explicated in these essays, even as frames, as Annett Blaugrund points out in her essay, add “so much to the perception and value of paintings” (17). Instead, the essays show how period frames may be studied and how such study aids our understanding of the Western art world. This collection of essays is divided into three parts: Part I, “The Aesthetics and History of American Framing,” recapitulates the form’s philosophy, history, and construction techniques. Part II, “The Individuality of Frame Styles,” surveys various artists, framemakers, and regions. Part III, “Museum Framing” offers essays on how various museums have collected and employed frames as strategies for display. A book of this nature must contain illustrations, and the many works reproduced here in color and in black and white amply serve the authors’ needs.

Part I begins with Blaugrund’s “On the Framing of Pictures,” in which she briefly sets forth some considerations on the uses, materials, and appearances of frames: “Frames function as decorative borders, as supports, and as protection for paintings. They call attention to the enclosed art and even reflect light on it. Frames separate pictures from their surrounding environment and serve as part of a comprehensive period style of interior design” (17). Lisa Koenigsberg, in her contribution “How the Edge Became a Center: The Rise of Interest in American Frames,” charts the frame “in its duality as border and entity” (25) and as a signifier in Western culture, from the framed pictures in the children’s book Goodnight Moon to advertising practices employing the frame to signal opulence and value. Koenigsberg offers the dilemma of the “‘Winterthur divide’” (27) that has (erroneously) promoted the handmade over the machine made. Thus mechanization of frame production “debased” the artifact’s value (thus differing from Wilner’s proposition). Koenigsberg also reviews museum exhibitions that included consideration of frames. Not surprisingly, these exhibitions’ subjects encompassed the aesthetic reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Last, Koenigsberg reviews what European scholars have produced in the field. “American Frame References From the Late Nineteenth Century: A Scattering of Attitudes,” by William H. Gerdts, considers the difficulty of frame design and selection in conjunction with the patron-artist relationship. Gerdts offers a review of the debates about framing art, marking that debate’s appearance in critical journals around the mid-1870s. Completing this section is Kevin Flaherty’s “On Verso: Observations on the Back of Frame,” a study of woods and construction techniques, and paper labels—all clues to a frame’s provenance.

Part II begins with “On the Edge of Change: Artist-Designed Frames from Whistler to Marin,” in which Suzanne Smeaton explores the relationship between the artist, the artwork, and the frame. Her emphasis on specific American artists (including several expatriates) spanning several late-nineteenth-century movements provides clues to the frame’s “invisibility” with its dissolution into an artwork itself. Nina Gray’s fascinating “Within Gilded Borders: The Frames of Stanford White” explores White as interior decorator, art collector, patron, and dealer, and demonstrates how these roles gave White a creative outlet beyond architecture. White not only designed frames, he also altered existing ones to fit a painting to its environment. “From Parlors to Pueblos: Frames for the American West, 1855–1925” contemplates a regionalist aesthetic to the study of framing choices and designs. Sally Mills imaginatively conceptualizes the “complex identity” inherent in western frames, as artists and framemakers working in the west knew and incorporated eastern models and taste until the close of the frontier. At that time, the nation sought to preserve “the West” through an aesthetic of rusticity, naturalistic form, Native American symbols, and earth tones.

In Part III, David Park Curry asks, “What’s In a Frame?” in his essay on the Virginia Museum of Art’s reframing project. Curry surveys images of public and museum exhibitions since the 1850s. From there he provides a set of considerations for similar projects and argues for specific choices made in reframing certain images in the museum’s collection. In “American Frames in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Choices and Changes,” Carrie Rebora Barratt continues that discussion, marking the opening in 1988 of the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art as the beginning of the reconsideration of frames as “the stepchild of the art collections” (157). An inventory of American picture frames begun in 1989 became a well-received exhibition in 1998 and provided a wealth of information and new questions for curators seeking to pair paintings with their original frames. Nancy Rivard Shaw offers her experience in reframing artwork in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts in “Marriages, Divorces, and Reconciliations: Challenges in Framing a Museum Collection.”

In the hands of Wilner and his contributors, the frame is elevated to the work of art; it acquires a legitimating philosophy, a provenance, individual makers, and regional differences, and is subject to active museum collecting and practice. I do not wish to diminish the collective contribution of The Gilded Edge by implying that the frame is somehow not art. Quite the contrary. This is a much-needed and welcome study. But it seems paradoxical that at the same time art history as an academic discipline is experiencing tectonic shifts in its subjects and methods, works such as The Gilded Edge rely so completely on traditional art history to make their claims to scholarly legitimacy. Why this continues to be so may pique the attention of those scholars and curators who have worked ceaselessly to open inquiry, question past practice, and democratize the field—even beyond what is considered “American.” Wilner, for example, continues to invoke what art historians seeking to elevate American art claimed a half-century ago: that “American picture frames developed their own unique identity after the birth of the nation” (11). Taking advantage of a new material called composition (colloquially, “compo”), American craftsmen “revolutionized the way in which American frames were made and designed” (11). If not genius, then certainly ingenuity is the hallmark of American character—and American artifacts on the market.