Framing Robert Kulicke

I talk about fine art, fine craft, and the decorative arts fairly incessantly here on Ars Longa, but rarely do these three somewhat related fields overlap more than with the work of Robert Kulicke Of course Kulicke was a painter (he studied under Leger), and much can be said about his modernist approach to the still life. But that's not really what this post is about. Kulicke's real claim to fame, in my eyes, were his breakthrough picture framing systems (pdf link). His philosophy that "True originality is always a byproduct of the search for a technical-esthetic solution to a technical-esthetic problem" remained at the very core of his work, and I think this is an important design tenet that we should continue to be mindful of. Sadly, he passed away in 2007 at the age of 83, but his legacy lives on in his breakthrough plexiglass box and welded aluminum frame designs that modernized the display of fine art. A style which continues to be prominent today.

• 06.17.09