Piecing It Together

Forget paintings. The frame of frames is ready for its close-up.

On Tuesday, take the tram to the top of the hill at the Getty Center, walk up the broad staircase to the museum and continue through the plaza to the South Pavilion. Then go to the second floor and proceed to the French galleries. There you will find a newly installed wonder of French craftsmanship, both old and new--a frame that outshines the painting it holds in value, importance and candlepower.

It surrounds an 18th century portrait of a grandee in full regalia, and the frame is part of the pomp and circumstance. Measuring 88 inches high and 66 inches wide, the elaborately carved and gilded creation is topped off with an extraordinary sculptural flourish: a coat of arms that includes a near-life-size eagle, an ermine cloak, a lacy crown, a wide-brimmed hat and a trio of swords. Each detail is carved to perfection and gilded to a mellow glow with dazzling highlights.

But it wasn’t always so. The portrait arrived at the museum 14 years ago, a pretty picture of Louis-Charles d’Orleans de Saint-Albin, in a badly butchered frame.

Painted in 1723 by Hyacinthe Rigaud, the leading court painter of the time, the portrait was probably commissioned to celebrate Louis-Charles’ appointment as archbishop of Cambrai. He was the illegitimate son of Philippe, Duc d’Orleans, who never officially recognized him but helped him rise in the church hierarchy. And here he is--dressed to the nines in the satin, lace and fur robes of his office.

The frame was expressly made for the painting, and it has equally important credentials. The work of Gilles-Marie Oppenord--chief architect and designer for the Duc d’Orleans during the Regency period (1715-23), when he was head of state--it’s a prime example of the golden age of French frame-making, when early 18th century virtuoso craftsmen created vast, sculptural frames for ceremonial portraits.

But the Getty didn’t know that when it acquired the painting. With the frame, all it had for sure was what conservators call a carcass--the skeleton of a once-vibrant work of decorative art.

At some point in the 224 years between the archbishop’s death and the Getty’s acquisition, all the ornamentation that extended beyond the frame’s rectangular core was cut off and discarded or lost. The massive coat of arms was gone. Acanthus-leaf corners, entwined with serpents, and a seashell on the bottom were also missing. Instead of 20 inches of decoration on the top of the painting and 11 inches on the sides and bottom, the carcass--albeit beautifully carved--was merely an 8-inch-wide border.

“Everything that didn’t coincide with a rectangle was just lopped off,” says Scott J. Schaefer, the Getty’s curator of paintings.

Another frame was found for the portrait and it went on display, first in Malibu, then at the new museum in Brentwood. But the old frame was a source of curiosity. Was it a 19th century reproduction or a real 18th century frame? Even in its greatly diminished condition, the quality of the carving and gilding suggested to some frame lovers that it might be the work of a master.

But what, if anything, to do about it? The carcass was in no condition to go on public view and nothing was known about its missing parts. Stashed away but not forgotten, it joined the Getty’s collection of old frames, where inferior examples go to die and superior ones get recycled when the right painting comes along.

It would take 14 years of advocacy and research on the part of Getty conservators, a key discovery by a French scholar, and finally the skill of two 21st century artisans with 18th century skills to put the archbishop’s frame back together again--with every last eagle feather, serpent scale, silk tassel and tuft of fur in place.

In hiring Rigaud and Oppenord, Louis-Charles entrusted his image to the most fashionable court painter and designer of the day. Rigaud--whose best-known work, a full-length portrait of Louis XIV, is at the Louvre--brought a high degree of formality to the tradition of court portraiture. Oppenord, who rose to prominence when French interior decoration reached its zenith, played an influential role in the development of Regency and Rococo styles while remodeling the vast Palais-Royal in Paris.

“It was about presentation,” Schaefer says of the portrait and frame. “Louis-Charles wanted you to be overwhelmed not only by his presence, but also by what he could do in spending money.”

After the death of Louis-Charles in 1764, the provenance of the portrait is sketchy. Apparently sold when his estate was dispersed, it landed in one or more private collections in Europe. The Getty bought the painting for an undisclosed price from a London dealer in 1988.

As for the butchery of the frame, “we don’t know why this was done,” says Gene Karraker, the Getty’s frames conservator. One theory is that the coat of arms at the top of the frame was deemed offensive and chopped off during the French Revolution. “That makes a good story,” he says, “but the frame could have been cut down to make it fit a particular space.” Another possibility is that “it was damaged and it was just easier to cut everything clean than to repair it.”

Still, the fact that the carcass continued to frame the painting for more than two centuries indicates that its value was recognized. “It’s gilded wood,” Schaefer says. “You have to remember that the frame probably cost far in excess of what the picture cost.”

At the Getty--where specialists know that 18th century French frames can rank among the finest decorative art objects of the period--the carcass may have been relegated to storage, but it continued to come up for discussion.

Andrea Rothe, a senior conservator of special projects who has developed considerable expertise in frames, and Elisabeth Mention, associate conservator of paintings, were among the early advocates. When Rothe noticed that faded areas of the canvas matched the inside contours of the frame, he concluded that it was more than a fine piece of 18th century craftsmanship; it was the painting’s original frame.

Gillian Wilson, the Getty’s curator of decorative arts, and Brian Considine, conservator of decorative arts and sculpture, eventually came to the same conclusion.

All of them wanted to solve the mystery, if only to satisfy their professional curiosity. In 1989, at the suggestion of Wilson and Considine, Mention wrote to Christian Baulez, chief curator at Versailles, requesting advice. After seeing a photograph of the frame, Baulez responded that it was probably made by Oppenord and recommended that she contact French scholar Bruno Pons, the leading expert on his work.

She took his advice and went to Paris to meet with Baulez and Pons, with additional photographs of the frame in hand. Pons did some research and came up with a stunning piece of evidence: an engraving in a book of Oppenord designs that laid out part of his plan for the frame.

“Without that, we wouldn’t have known how to proceed,” Karraker says.

But even then, what to do about the frame wasn’t clear. It simply wasn’t a high priority during the Getty’s big growth spurt in the early ‘90s--when the museum was aggressively building its collections and planning for the new building in Brentwood, which opened in 1997.

“We had so many issues on the front burner, given the move into the Getty Center and getting the galleries ready for that,” says Mark Leonard, who heads the museum’s paintings conservation department. “The frame was one of those things we set aside and knew we would get to eventually.”

Once they did, the task was formidable. The Oppenord engraving was merely a preliminary plan of sculptural elements, without much detail, and it didn’t show all the missing parts. How could the frame be accurately re-created? And who could possibly do the job?

“It’s not just restoration; it’s reconstruction,” Leonard says. “That’s very different from most of the work we do here. Re-creating a massive loss is something you want to approach thoughtfully.”

Ultimately, the problem was twofold: “Finding a carver and gilder skilled enough to do the work, and finding the funding for it,” Karraker says.

He talked with frame dealers in London, without success: “They do incredible restoration work, but it was just too much for them.”

Then Considine had a bright idea: Bruno Desnoues and Youri Dmitrenko. Desnoues, a carver, and Dmitrenko, a gilder, have separate studios in Paris but frequently work on joint projects. The one that caught Considine’s attention was an 18th century French canopied bed at the Getty. The top of the canopy was missing when the museum acquired it in 1994, but Desnoues carved a replacement and Dmitrenko did the gilding.

“The amazing thing is, we didn’t find a photograph of the complete bed until the work was done,” Karraker says. “Then we saw that Bruno had re-created it exactly, without ever seeing it.”

The Getty paid for the frame project with funds set aside for outside services. As for the cost of the reconstruction and restoration, Getty spokesmen will say only that it’s just a fraction of the frame’s value.

“If it was $50,000, it was money well spent,” says Larry Shar, president of Julius Lowy Frame & Restoring Co. Inc., a major frame dealer in New York. “If it was $100,000, I would like to have had the job.”

Whatever it took to revive the Oppenord, it is now the most valuable frame in the museum’s collection, conservators say. That puts it in the vague but lofty range of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In Paris, 18th century frames are plentiful and the restoration of decorative arts is a thriving--if highly specialized--business. But even in the ateliers of the best craftsmen, re-creating the authentic spirit and flamboyantly decorative life of a huge Oppenord carcass is a rare and daunting challenge.

“It was, I think, the most difficult work I ever did,” Dmitrenko says.

The project began in 1996, when the frame was sent to France. Its first stop was Desnoues’ studio, a sparsely furnished unit in a picturesque courtyard in the 12th Arrondissement, on the east side of Paris. Metal gates on a major thoroughfare lead to a shady lane, where grapes are still grown and turned into wine. The studios on both sides of the path might appear to belong to another era as well, except for their modern furnishings and computers.

Slim, animated and intensely involved in his work, Desnoues has the demeanor of a professional who gets to the point and works quickly. Why, then, did it take him four years to do his part of the Getty project?

For one thing, he didn’t have a deadline. For another, he had other jobs to do and couldn’t devote all of his time to the frame. But the primary reason is the unusual nature of the project and Desnoues’ personality.

“To say that Bruno is an eccentric is somewhat of an understatement,” Karraker says. “The frame sat in his studio for a year with very little work being done to it. He said he needed to look at it every day so that when he started to work, he wouldn’t have to think about it. He felt that if he looked at it and studied it long enough, he would become Oppenord’s carver and just proceed in the style of the original designer.”

Crazy as that may sound, it makes sense to other restorers. The goal is look at an object over an extended period of time, so that “your understanding of it becomes second nature,” the Getty’s Leonard says. “Therefore, there is less of a danger of imposing yourself on the object. You know the object so well that it guides you.”

At the same time that Desnoues was living, breathing and, he says, “dreaming the frame,” he was doing a lot of research. He had worked with other Oppenord material and knew his style, but the Getty frame was a puzzle.

Pulling large binders off a shelf and laying them out on a table in his studio, Desnoues talks of digging through libraries and archives for clues that would help him reconstruct the frame accurately. He also recalls scouring the Louvre’s decorative arts storage areas and going to Versailles, where he found documentation of individual elements on the frame. In one small but essential breakthrough, he and Dmitrenko discovered that a mysterious, ribbon-like form on the carcass was the tongue of a serpent that weaves through foliage around a corner.

Desnoues started the construction process by making a plaster cast of what remained of the old frame. Then he made drawings and paper cutouts of proposed additions and attached them to the plaster, to see how the proportions worked. When he had a model that seemed right, he carved it in Plasticine, an oil-base modeling paste. The final, working model was a plaster cast of the Plasticine frame with its new additions.

That was all preliminary to actually re-creating the missing parts of the frame. First, Desnoues glued together blocks of European lime wood, which is similar to poplar, in a rough approximation of the original contours. He also cut small blocks so that he could replace little tips of fur and other bits that had been knocked off the carcass. Then he carved the pieces and attached them to the carcass, before sending the whole thing to Dmitrenko’s atelier. Desnoues came as close as possible to the original, but there is no way to calculate the precision of his work.

“Looking at Bruno’s finished carving, you think you couldn’t get any more detailed,” the Getty’s Karraker says, flipping through photographs of the process. “But that is only half of it. His job is remarkable, but what Youri had to do was to make this remarkable object extraordinary. A lot of the detail that we see in the finished project is only done in the gesso,” he says, referring to a white, chalk-and-glue fluid applied to wood as a ground for gilding.

Dmitrenko, who has painstakingly finished the frame during the past two years, plies his obscure trade in a modest storefront studio in the outer reaches of the 20th Arrondissement, a working-class district in the process of gentrification. On a quiet weekday morning--two months before the frame was shipped to Los Angeles by air in a specially designed, heavily padded wooden crate-- the only action on his street takes place at a nearby Renault garage. No sign or street number marks Dmitrenko’s shop. The only indication that someone might be working behind the large, smoked-glass windows is a slip of paper taped to the door bearing a handwritten message in French: Knock loudly and wait patiently.

Inside, the walls are hung with antique frames and furniture awaiting the ministrations of Dmitrenko, his wife, Anne, and two assistants. Each of the four sides of the Getty frame sits on a different table or work station. A well-fed cat snoozes on one table, beside a gilded section that will soon be patinated.

When the frame arrived at his studio, Dmitrenko cleaned the original components and sealed the new sections with rabbit skin glue. Then he covered them with several coats of gesso, which can be carved in greater detail than wood and provides a better surface for gilding. With the consistency of heavy cream, the gesso fills crevices and softens edges. When it dried, Dmitrenko recut the shapes Desnoues had carved and added the fine points, creating a sharp-edged, multifaceted surface that is highly reflective when gilded.

“Regence recutting is probably the most ornate,” Karraker says, referring to the Regency period when the frame was made. “It’s one of the hardest to reproduce. There are very few people in the world who can do it as well as Youri.”

“I don’t think I am the best,” Dmitrenko says, while cutting veins in an acanthus leaf with a curved blade made of agate. “But if the Getty chose me, there must be a reason.”

Among the reasons is that he goes beyond what might be expected, even in the top echelon of his craft. “On the back of the fur pelt that drapes over the top of the frame, he recut a brocade pattern because he found that the back of the leather would have been tooled during this period,” Karraker says. “He had to research what pattern would have been used and then put it on the back. That’s a detail the public is never going to see, but it’s a detail he has to do. Or that he does do.”

When the recutting was complete, the gessoed surfaces were covered with bole, a finely ground earth composed of clay and iron oxide. Then gold leaf was applied, one tiny flake at a time, and burnished to heighten the brilliance. The final challenge was to apply a patina that would match the original gilding.

When the frame was new, it was bright gold, but tastes have changed and the painting itself has aged. What’s more, silver and copper mixed with the original gold leaf had oxidized, Dmitrenko says. Gilders tend to guard the formulas they devise for patinas, and Dmitrenko is no exception. “I have many jars to choose from,” he says, pointing to a row of potions on a shelf but giving away no secrets.

If the patina is his final signature on the project, Desnoues’ is a tiny wooden fly that appears to have alighted on the brim of the hat at the top of the frame. “Bruno does have a sense of humor,” Karraker says. “He wanted his own mark on the frame, so he included himself as a fly.”

Pictures that remain in their original frames for more than a century are rare. Of the 447 paintings and pastels in the Getty Museum’s collection--which covers the 13th through the 19th centuries--only 31 are in the frames initially made for them. And that includes seven early Italian works in which the frame and the painting are made from a single block of wood.

“Tastes change. Decorating habits change. People remove frames and throw them out or use them for other things,” paintings curator Schaefer says.

When the Getty acquires an artwork with a frame that is deemed unsuitable, the search is on for a “new” old frame. Conservators first scour their storeroom. If they are lucky, they find something of the right style and period that can be cut down or built out to fit. If not, they turn to the international marketplace or reproduce a period frame.

As for what to choose, “it comes to what presents the painting best,” Karraker says. “Too much ornamentation really detracts from the painting.”

Current taste at the Getty calls for “bringing the quality of the frame to match the quality of the painting, but never to overshadow it,” Karraker says. “I focus on frames because that’s what I deal with every day, all day. But I also realize that people don’t come here to look at frames. When they take the tram down from the museum, I want them to remember the paintings, not the frames.”

The Oppenord frame is a special case, however. Crowned with an eagle, entwined with serpents and whimsically signed with a fly, it isn’t likely to be overlooked.

“When I came here, I have to admit that I thought the painting was not the greatest Rigaud I had seen,” says Schaefer, who arrived at the Getty in 1999.

“But when this frame goes around it, it will step up. We are doing a separate label for the frame, simply as an object. The label for the frame will be equal to the label for the painting.”

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Suzanne Muchnic is a Times staff writer.