The frames that surround works of art are often overshadowed by the paintings within them. For Marcelo Bavaro, the frames themselves are a kind of art. Bavaro, fifty years old, is the co-owner of a frame shop called Quebracho Inc. He is a fourth-generation frame maker: his family began crafting frames in Florence in the early nineteenth century. They left for Argentina in 1907, bringing their trade with them. Now situated in a studio in Brooklyn, Quebracho is known for restoring and creating hand-carved, gilded frames that are often commissioned by large art institutions like the Met. The company has constructed or restored frames for works by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and Marina Abramović, among many others.
Frames have long played a marginal role in the art world, but, as Leo Carey wrote in a 2006 article about Tracy Gill and Simeon Lagodich, who built a new frame for Camille Pissarro’s “The Climbing Path, L’Hermitage, Pontoise,” curators have started to pay closer attention to framing in recent decades.
Using many of the same tools that his great-grandfather used, Bavaro, along with the ten full-time craftsmen he employs, plies his trade in much the same way that it was done two hundred years ago. The frames are costly—a hundred and fifty to eight hundred dollars per foot—and a single commission can take up to ten weeks to finish. “There are other ways of making money with much less effort,” Bavaro says. “This is painstaking.”
