Goran Simic

The legend
of Adam the frame

Mr. Grieg was dead tired when the last applicant for the position of Master Framer showed up. For the eighteenth time that day, he took out of the drawer a painting not bigger than a book that depicted a tree trunk fighting with waves of a surging river, and for the eighteenth time that day he asked: what frame would you use for this painting?

The tall, bald and unusually thin man smiled briefly and said that the painting could not accept a frame. More precisely, he said that there was no frame strong enough to hold back the force of the wave in the painting.

A poet is the last thing I need today, Mr. Grieg thought, admitting that this guy was still better than the previous applicant, who believed Tom Thomson's painting to be a worthless modernist daub.

"And if I still insist on framing it?" Mr. Grieg asked, watching the beanpole's finger hover over the picture.

"Then you don't need me but anybody who can make frames," the beanpole said, bowed, and left the office.

And like you are something special, Mr. Grieg wanted to shout after him caustically, but instead of packing up and going home, he pondered for a moment, grabbed his key and jumped up. Then the workmen who were finishing the staircase saw Mr. Grieg, the director of the new Art Gallery of Ontario that was soon to open, jump over pails of paint and cement and run after the thin man.

This guy is either a lunatic or a genius. Such people don't look for work; instead, the work finds them, thought Mr. Grieg, while pulling the thin man into the tiny room that only he had the key to. It was the hidden gallery of his worries and sleepless nights.

"Since you consider yourself a special master, solve this problem and you've got yourself a job," he said and showed the thin man the painting Fishing Boats at Sea, by the old master Hendrik Willem Mesdag. Seemingly, nothing out of the ordinary: fishing boats on a calm sea. But water was oozing from the painting and making a pool on the floor. The thin man bent over, licked the water and without a trace of surprise said that it was seawater and that the painting needed exactly the right frame.

"Only a frame made of wood used for ships can withstand the sea," he said, promising that he would make the frame in a week and persuade the painting to move into it.

A week later, the workmen who were taking down the scaffold and picking up their brushes thought that Mr. Grieg had landed a huge inheritance, after seeing him capering merrily and kissing the newly painted gallery walls. That day, the thin man moved into the basement workshop, bringing with him only a bag full of tools.

His name was Adam. He never told anyone his last name, so they dubbed him Adam the Frame. No one knew where he had come from, but his accent ­ although he spoke only rarely ­ made them assume he'd come from Europe. Some claimed that he had come from the Belgian city of Antwerp, where the art of picture framing was so common that even children made frames for the wonderful dreams they had.

"I was born long ago and I come from nowhere," he said and it was all they knew about him. People assumed he was over 60, although there were quite a few who, watching Adam's pale unwrinkled face, claimed that he was a spirit, since only a spirit could resolve the Salon's many problems after the AGO opened.

Indeed, the Salon, the most beautiful room in the whole Gallery, reeked of decay so much that everybody kept well away from it. Nothing helped: neither coats of paint on the wall nor scents secretly placed in the room's nooks. Then Adam spent a whole night in the room and in the morning announced, coughing, that the stench was coming from painting Nature Morte aux Huitres by Gustave Caillebotte. The frame was too thin. He made a thick decorative frame, lowered the temperature to zero and the stench disappeared.

The trouble was, numerous visitors stood freezing in front of the painting, and someone remarked that the Gallery could make a lot of money selling hot tea. Somebody else spitefully remarked in the visitors' book that it was better to live in stench than freeze to death.

Mr. Grieg did not refuse Adam's requests to occasionally spend a night alone with the paintings. The night watchman, Jovan the Bosnian, swore that he had heard Adam talk a few times to the paintings in different languages, and that figures from paintings argued with him. One morning, frantic with fear, he reported to Mr. Grieg that a rainstorm had been raging in Pavilion Two all night long, and when they got in everything was fine, except that they found Adam's pipe under Joseph Wright of Derby's painting Antigonus in the Storm.

Once the painting The Fire in the Saint-Jean Quarter by Joseph Légaré sent up smoke and smelled of burning for days, and they had to put a barrel filled with water next to it in case the fire spread from the frame. Adam put it into a new frame of wood ordered from the northern woods and the painting calmed down. On another occasion, he kept the portrait of the pale Marchesa Casati in the sun the whole day and it was incredible to see colour returning to the Marchesa's face. He would bring in a cat from the street and leave it to spend the whole day among paintings portraying cats, and Mr. Grieg joked that he was lucky not to have any elephant paintings in the Gallery.

The mystical way in which Adam reconciled a painting with its frame, or the painting with the Gallery wall, also reconciled Adam with Mr. Grieg, who got used to being forbidden to enter the workshop while the master was working on frames. But he couldn't do anything about how sad Adam looked after his son Sebastian moved in.

Sebastian was a 25-year-old fellow who had just completed art studies in Paris, full of his own importance and scornful of others. The very opposite to modest Adam. Judging by his arrogance, he had mainly studied wines in Paris pubs and spent more time in front of the mirror adjusting his black hat than at his easel. He would wake up in the afternoon, then roam the city with an empty sketchbook under his arm, and end the day in the restaurant where Adam used to eat, leaving his large bills for his father to pay. He professed that he painted by night and when Adam told him that his loud snoring didn't sound like work, he said that dreams helped him conceive his first exhibition that would, beyond any doubt, be revolutionary and a world success. He showed his father some of his oil paintings and, caught between paternal love for his only son and the desire to rebuke him, Adam would have been happier if he had not seen them at all.

"I hope they taught him more than this, considering all the money I was sending him," he thought, not without pain, while gazing at nondescript portraits and colourless landscapes.

Then, for months, Adam tried to persuade him, mildly and softly, to start learning the craft of picture framing, explaining that it was not only the technology of chisel and wood but rather the art of understanding a picture. A painting was the soul, while the frame was its body: they could not exist without each other.

"I've known lots of pictures which would fade overnight because of an unsuitable frame, and I've known lots of frames that would fall off pictures, in protest, no matter how strong the glue was," Adam told him, "since pictures and frames have a life of their own and breathe together. Thus, to offer a wrong frame to a picture is the same as to walk in shoes two sizes smaller than your foot." For months, Sebastian had been trying to escape his father's instruction, claiming that he was exhausted or not in the right mood. Finally he agreed to learn after Adam stopped paying bills for his nightly tippling. But only after his exhibition and provided Adam himself made frames for the twenty paintings he wanted to exhibit. Adam was angry for two days, pondering about the unreasonable price he was paying for his son's love but then agreed, comforting himself with the thought that parental love had no logical limits anyway.

That year, Adam's skill in picture framing and his advice in particular were so highly valued in Toronto that painters vied to have his frames on their work. His workshop was filling with paintings and the Gallery till with money, to the satisfaction of Mr. Grieg, so much so that Mr. Grieg felt he had no choice but to promise Adam the main floor of the Gallery for Sebastian's exhibition. In order to cheer him up a tiny bit, he did not meddle in the master's estimates for other framing he undertook in his workshop, according to which he would charge some painters, not charge others at all and turn down still others after a single glance at a painting. Scenes were not rare of angry painters storming out of the workshop. Neither was it rare that the same painter returned with another painting a couple of days later.

Much as painters liked coming to Adam's workshop, they would disperse in a jiffy when Sebastian appeared with his presumptuous theories about kitsch as the art of future.

"The world will not need painters since every human being will be a kitsch-painter," Sebastian stated without noticing how others flushed with rage, staying silent only out of regard for Adam. Doubtless they wished more than anything to wring Sebastian's neck.

Adam worked on the promised frames by night and in the month before the exhibition only the sounds of chisel, wooden hammer and a strange language could be heard from his tiny room. I do not know how much truth there is in the story that he was talking to wood and that he could speak the language of forests, but it is true that he never used a single nail when joining parts of the frame. Only glue that did not offend the wood.

Mr. Grieg was somewhat cross at Adam for devoting more attention to his son's exhibition than to his regular work, and somewhat crosser because the master had grown thinner and even more taciturn. However, the night before the exhibition, when the paintings were mounted in frames and put up on the walls, Mr. Grieg almost lost his breath from the beauty that permeated him when he saw the frames. Everything the paintings lacked was replaced by carvings on the frames. If the portrait inside a frame was nondescript, the thick frame portrayed over a dozen of the same carved faces in different moods. If the painting of a foaming sea lacked force, the frame was made up of waves so skilfully sculpted that it seemed they would crash down on the viewer any moment ­ a flock of seagulls were sculpted so powerfully that only the fact they were made of wood prevented them from soaring. The art was in the frames. Jovan the Bosnian almost thought Mr. Grieg had gone crazy when he found him roaring with laughter in front of the paintings, for a reason known only to himself.

Next morning, Jovan swore to the police that he had spent the whole night in the Gallery awake and had not seen thieves nor heard the door being forced. The detectives were scratching their ears, staring at Sebastian's paintings scattered across the floor.

Only the frames had disappeared. As if they had taken off by themselves.

The same day, Sebastian dumped the paintings in the garbage, picked up his things and left. Two days later Adam also said goodbye to Mr. Grieg. That day, the Art Gallery of Ontario was closed for visitors, who were exasperated to hear the odd explanation that the paintings were not ready for viewing. The paintings in the Gallery were mourning.

"You do not need me here any longer," Adam said and left.

As he left with only his bag of tools, he looked so thin that he resembled a frame in search of its painting.

Translated from the Bosnian by Milica Babic.