A rare art show that puts focus on the frame, not (just) the picture

So, you're an art lover, and you can claim - or brag - to have travelled the world and seen many masterpieces. "Mona Lisa" in Paris. "Guernica" in Madrid. "Starry Night" in New York. "The Night Watch" in Amsterdam. And so on.

But now be honest: Do you recall their frames?

You might respond, no - but so what? Who cares about the frames? It's an answer that likely would have triggered a sharp retort from German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938). To him, the frame was an integral part of the overall work - the German word for it is "Gesamtkunstwerk" (total work of art) - and therefore important enough for him to design, and even build, his own frames.

Now, a one-of-a-kind exhibition south-west of Munich explores the subject of original frames of several dozen Kirchner paintings. The show puts the focus on the different types of frames, which most museum visitors likely overlook.

Around 60 works - most on loan from the Kirchner Museum in Davos, Switzerland - are featured in the show titled "Rediscovered and Reunited" in the Buchheim Museum in Bernried, a lakeside town about an hour outside of Munich by car or public transport.

For the show, organised by Buchheim deputy director Rajka Knipper and curated by Munich master frame builder Werner Murrer, Kirchner paintings were reunited with their original frames - or with reproductions based on archival and photographic evidence of the originals.

All in homage to the aesthetic views that Kirchner - a founding member of the "Brücke" (bridge) Expressionist movement in Dresden in 1905 - held about his art.

"I never put unframed pictures in exhibitions, that's not possible with my work," Kirchner wrote in a letter to Lucas Lichtenhahn, director of the Basel Kunsthalle in 1917. "If I do something, I do it as well as possible, otherwise I'd rather not."

If they didn't know about such things before, visitors will become acquainted with a variety of frames which the artist designed and either made himself or commissioned local craftsmen to make: Plank frames, fluted frames, circular rod frames and double circular rod frames. Kirchner also occasionally created baroque frames.

Just over 150 of Kirchner's original frames are known. In preparing the show, researchers had 23 empty frames to work with, but in the course of their work they located and reunited nine paintings with their original frames.

In a remarkable highlight for an art exhibition, the curators left 14 frames empty, covering an entire wall of the Buchheim museum.

So how is it that so many Kirchner canvases and frames became separated in the first place? One explanation is that buyers might have had their own tastes in frames and so would have a new one made and simply discarded the Kirchner frame.

Another factor was the fact that Kirchner's partner Emma Schilling deframed some of his canvases in Dresden so as to covertly ship them to Switzerland to avoid their being seized by the Nazi regime's suppression of "degenerate" art.

"What is fortunate is that Kirchner kept extensive records which helped us in our detective work of putting things back together," exhibition curator Werner Murrer comments. "He took many photographs of his paintings with their frames, and also kept detailed notebook entries on the frames he designed for the works."

Murrer said the "absolute highlight" of the exhibition is the "Blick ins Tobel" (View into a Ravine), a painting from 1919-1920. For the first time ever, it is being shown to the public with its original simple plank frame thanks to the cooperation of international museums.

A prime example of a reconstructed frame is the triptych "Alpine Life" from 1925 portraying three scenes of the Swiss mountain landscape and the local people. The original frame was lost over time, but thanks to photographs, it could be reconstructed in the original gold bronze that Kirchner had set it in.

Murrer says Kirchner was virtually unique among artists in his passion about frames. Some other artists such as Edvard Munch and Vassily Kandinsky were known to have made designs for a few frames, the curator notes.

"But they (Munch and Kandinsky) were not nearly as deeply involved in this aspect as was Kirchner," Murrer says. "He worked intensively on his frames. In his view they were meant as an extension of the painting, to allow the picture to keep moving out and beyond into the world, and not be limited by boundaries."

The exhibition runs until January 12, 2025.