Right frame of mind

The basic task seemed simple enough, especially at a place like the J. Paul Getty Museum. Match 40 drawings with appropriate mats and frames and hang them. Nothing particularly daunting in that. So curator Lee Hendrix, who arrived at the Getty in 1985 and has led the drawings department since 1998, took a sabbatical last summer, just as work began on “Defining Modernity: European Drawings, 1800-1900,” the current exhibition that inaugurates the museum’s new drawings galleries.

When she returned in September, though, she says she “was accosted by people saying, ‘This is really complicated, and it’s going to be disastrous if we don’t mobilize in a big way. I realized that unless we made a concerted effort to think through every part of the project and really control the aesthetic experience that we wanted to produce, it was going to be a catastrophe. During the last few months there were probably, at any given moment, 10 people dealing with it.”

In fact, “armies of people were involved,” Hendrix says. “It was a team effort, and it took forever.” Curators, mat makers, framers, color consultants, exhibition designers and technicians plied their trades. A storied consultant imparted the pivotal word: sycamore. The project took 18 months, all to create a setting that, at its most successful, would fade into the background.

Part of the fuss was because the show would launch a program that would treat drawings as independent works of art. That isn’t a new idea, but it’s an abrupt change at the Getty. The museum founded its drawings collection 26 years ago and acquired its first 19th century example, “Still Life With Blue Pot” by Paul Cezanne, in 1983. When the Getty Center opened in 1997, the cache of drawings was relatively small, and it was treated as a study collection. The drawings were mounted with standard cream-colored mats, without frames, and displayed in a cave-like gallery outfitted with glass cases.

But “Defining Modernity” would bring a selection from the collection, which has grown to about 700 pieces, onto the walls, if not into the light, exactly -- to protect the artwork, the light level would have to stay low.

Anxiety would not.

Complications

With its fat budget and technical resources, the Getty is famous for doing labor-intensive projects. A task like converting former photo exhibition spaces into drawings galleries and putting up a show from the collection, though, wouldn’t appear to be one of them.

Complications began to arise, along with a certain Getty obsessiveness, when Hendrix and assistant curator Christine Giviskos, who organized the show, decided to inaugurate the galleries with 19th century material to celebrate the fastest-growing part of the drawings collection and complement the concurrent exhibition of Edouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere,” a masterpiece of 19th century painting lent by the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. It wasn’t an easy place to start.

“Before the 19th century, frames conformed to periods and nationalities,” Hendrix says. “Dutch 17th century frames are Dutch 17th century frames. The Impressionists abandoned the rules, so anything goes.” Some artists preferred historic frames, but others went modern or shopped in junk stores, she says. “It’s the first era when people married the image and the frame in an individual aesthetic. Drawings were framed, hung on walls and treated as works of art in and of themselves. We had to take a trial-and-error approach to understand the spirit of each drawing.”

Matting and framing museum pieces is not as simple as it may look. Dressing up each of the Getty works in a style thought to be in keeping with the artist’s preference and the character of the art required research, not to mention lots of looking and consultation.

Edgar Degas often designed simple machine-made frames with grooved surfaces, like the off-white period frame chosen for the Getty’s 1879 drawing of an acrobat, “Miss Lala at the Fernando Circus.” The energetic portrayal of a wildly popular performer hanging by her teeth needed a streamlined frame to emphasize the modernity of the subject, Hendrix says.

Cezanne’s watercolor-over-graphite still life presented a different sort of challenge.

“We went to another extreme, and one you would never expect,” Hendrix says. “We have paired the most modern of our 19th century drawings with a Louis XIV frame, the most historic, ornamented, carved, gilded, reactionary frame in the exhibition. The drawing is all about the dynamic interaction of the elements, a busy, floral Provencal tablecloth, draped and mounded over a table with a pitcher and pots and apples that seem about to tumble off the edge. We started out framing it in a very plain, modern gold frame, and it didn’t help the art at all. So we had this inspiration. There is a wonderful synergy between this vividly carved and gilded, monumental frame and the muscular dynamism of the Cezanne.”

Paul Gauguin’s “Head of a Tahitian Girl” got a plain, weathered frame that reflects the primitive style of the 1892 charcoal drawing and a light gray mat that opens the space around the subject, who stares with an angry expression. Georges Seurat’s ghostly, inward-looking image of his mother, shaded in black crayon on textured paper, is enclosed in a dark gray mat and a machine-made frame that has lost most of its gilding.

“Each one of these frames and mats has been arrived at by this aesthetic process,” Hendrix says. “What opens the drawing? What closes it in? What complements its unique range of colors?” It’s the experience familiar to anyone who’s taken a print to be framed -- inspiration, disappointment and surprise, but here with trained eyes and the layers of possibilities afforded by the Getty’s resources. (By contrast, seven pieces lent by the Courtauld arrived in identical cream mats and narrow wood moldings and stayed that way.)

A natural palette

Most of the frames were culled from the Getty’s large holding and adapted to fit. Mats were also made on site, but with about 30 colors to choose from, the Getty staff sought counsel from Calvin Brown, a preparator at the Princeton University Art Museum who for many years made mats for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

He visited the Getty and told Hendrix, “Limit your colors to sycamore bark,” she recalls. Cryptic as the advice may have sounded, it was a means of finding choices that harmonized naturally. “We have a grove of sycamore trees here, so we went out and looked at them,” Hendrix says. “We ended up with about eight colors, a range of beiges, browns and grays.”

The wall colors also went through “several permutations,” Hendrix says, “each time tried out with huge painted rectangles, with some of the drawings placed in front of them.” Each gallery was to have a colored accent wall coupled with three walls of a lighter, complementary hue. The theory, she says, was to create a distinctive ambience related to the content of the artworks -- portraits and nudes in the first room, more adventurous themes of “modern life” and landscape in the second.

On the first try, the navy blue in the first gallery seemed “too dense,” she says, and the teal blue in the adjacent room “didn’t say enough about innovation in the 19th century.” In the second round, cerulean blue worked in the first gallery, but a vibrant purple taken from Pierre Bonnard’s “Moulin Rouge” pastel overpowered the artworks. After the mat colors were selected, the wall color in the second gallery shifted to a relatively soft yellow.

“We had to back off of the idea of communicating ‘innovation’ through the wall color and let the drawings themselves communicate this,” she says. (The walls themselves do communicate a new brightness, because the light is more evenly dispersed against their colorful surfaces.)

Oblivious to the behind-the-scenes struggle, visitors simply look at the artworks. But that’s the point. The idea, Hendrix says, was “to provide a meditative experience for visitors to relate to each drawing as an individual work of art.” And hardly notice the frame.

suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com