New, made-to-order frames bring out the best in the Brooklyn Museum's Impressionist pictures.

Something has happened to the Impressionist paintings lining the walls of the Brooklyn Museum of Art's fifth-floor Beaux-Arts court. Gone are the gilded Louis XIV-style frames that have been used almost universally by museums, dealers, and collectors to showcase masterpieces by artists such as Monet, Degas, and Matisse. They have been replaced by an eclectic group of frames designed by framer Jared Bark, in collaboration with Elizabeth Easton, head of the museum's department of European paintings and sculpture, to let the characteristics of each painting speak as clearly as possible.

A frame creates a context. Dealers at the turn of the 20th century dressed Impressionist paintings, considered radical at the time, in extravagant 18th-century frames, often against the wishes of the artists, to give the pictures a certain legitimacy. Museums have done the same over the years, including the Brooklyn Museum, which reframed many paintings with fussy gold reproductions in the 1970s. Easton points out a Degas pastel in the storage room that was sold at the artist's estate sale in a white reed cushion frame of his own design. It was still on the painting in 1968, the date on an old slide of the work she found. Sometime after, she laments, the original frame was tossed out in favor of one more grandiose, which she says overwhelms the picture.

"The Impressionists were vociferous in the own desire to do away with traditional frames and change the way their pictures were viewed," says Easton. While many museums in recent years have reframed their collections with choices more contemporaneous to the pictures, Easton notes that Bark is the first to "invent" frame solutions specific to each picture. The original frames "were deliberately very simple, painted and designed often by the artists, Degas especially," Easton explains. "I'm not saying we're doing exactly what the Impressionists would have wanted, but it's an homage."

Bark, who founded Bark Frameworks in New York's SoHo over three decades ago, says that the ideal way to frame a picture is to go from the picture out, to "find an element, a quality, a form in the picture, and choose or design a frame that somehow resonates with that." The result will be "a frame that is truly made for the picture, and the discerning eye recognizes that."

Knowing the artist's preferences makes the job considerably easier. Yet fewer than a dozen original Impressionist frames survive. One is a greenish brown fluted wood molding selected by Gustave Caillebotte for his portrait of Richard Gallo and his dog, now in a private collection. "The owner has reluctantly kept this frame on because it's an important picture, and he wants a fancy frame," says Easton. Bark took the exact measurements of the frame, and when it came time to consider how to reframe the museum's 1885 Caillebotte painting of a railroad bridge, a re-proportioned version of this molding was the answer. "The idea was to make a frame that has sort of a mechanical feel- essentially framing a railroad within a big railroad- that also has the provenance of having been used by the artist," says Bark.

Easton and Bark may be the first people to research Impressionist frames in such depth. Degas was an important starting point for them, because his ideas about frames had been published. Degas made drawings of more than 40 different profiles, or cross sections, of architectural moldings during the late 1870s through the 1880s. Bark was the first framer—as opposed to art historian—to pore over Degas's 38 original notebooks in the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, and he realized that these sketches were 4 ½ inches wide- the width of a standard frame profile.

"These weren't just thinking with a pencil," says Bark about the drawings. "They were refined, distilled frame designs- essentially shop drawings that were ready to go." Bark and Easton selected one of them, a minimal profile resembling a pipe with a grooved bowl, in order to reinforce the linear quality of the museum's huge, unfinished drawing on canvas of a woman in a bathtub that Degas did in the mid-1880's, contemporaneous with the drawing of the frame.

But what to do when no such marriage of picture and frame presents itself? In the case of a very small but important Matisse landscape, marking the beginning of the painter's separation of line and color, Easton and Bark used the painting's original owner, George Of, as a starting point. Of was a modernist framer himself who worked for Alfred Stieglitz and his 291 gallery. While they didn't how Of had framed the Matisse, Bark designed a spare architectural molding that respected Of's esthetic. Then they considered color. Because Matisse painted the piece on panel with a gray-beige primer, which is visible in patches in the background, putting it in a gold frame only made it look dirty, not brighter. So they chose a putty color close to that of the primer, which makes each lozenge of color pop. Easton notes that when the painting was loaned to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 2001, for the exhibition "Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and his New York Galleries," "they wanted to just paint right over the frame."

The most radical frame Bark and Easton have created is for Monet's 1908 view of the doge's palace and its reflection as an assertive, yet flickering, almost solid-looking rectangle in the waters of the Grand Canal in Venice. "We tried all the molding frames, and nothing was detailed enough to complement the picture," says Easton. Bark adds, "I knew we needed to create a broken surface on which light could flicker. But I was at a loss as to how to create some version that didn't thrust it into another tradition." After avoiding the matter for a few years, Bark had a flash of insight, while driving, of hand carving an indented flute and then slicing it into small units that could be patterned in staggered rows around the edge of the painting. While the previous frame drew the eye to the fussy corner and center ornaments, like exclamation points, this allover patterning buttresses the geometry of the picture and doesn't direct the eye anywhere but to the painting itself.

"The first time we showed a slide of it at the College Art Association, people gasped," says Easton. '"To make a completely harmonious frame for our picture by Jozef Rippl-Ronai, for instance, whom relatively few people know, is less of a scandal than to take a great Monet and say 'I'm going to show it to you in a completely different way.' But the luxury of being at a museum is that I don't have to market the painting. We're finding a frame for an individual work of art instead of a category, which is what history has handed down to us. This process has reawakened my vision."