Robert Kulicke, 83; artist modernized frame design
Robert M. Kulicke, a painter, goldsmith, teacher, businessman, and designer who changed the look of postwar art by modernizing frame design, died on Friday in Valley Cottage, N.Y. He was 83 and had lived in Manhattan until about 18 months ago.
The cause was pneumonia, said Roy Davis of Davis & Langdale Co., the gallery that represented Mr. Kulicke since 1974, when it was called Davis & Long.
Garrulous, articulate, and confident, Mr. Kulicke was a man of many talents, interests, and passions. He painted and regularly exhibited small, delicate still-lifes of flowers, dollar bills or, often, a single pear. He helped to revive the ancient cloisonné technique of granulation and to establish a school for jewelry making. Widely knowledgeable in art history, he often supported himself and his businesses by buying and selling medieval art and Coptic textiles.
But for much of his life, Mr. Kulicke was the most innovative and influential picture frame designer in the United States. His reputation rested primarily on several streamlined frames that were both widely used and imitated, especially a welded aluminum frame and a wrap-around clear Lucite "plexibox" frame.
He also designed sectional frames that could be bought and assembled, sidestepping frame shops completely. In addition, he was a superb craftsman of reproduction frames, making them for some of the greatest paintings in this country, including Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci in the National Gallery of Art in Washington and Giotto's "Epiphany" in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Robert Moore Kulicke was born in 1924 in Philadelphia. Since both his father and older brother were design engineers, design was a constant topic around the dinner table. He studied art in high school and advertising design at the Philadelphia College of Art, but later said that he largely educated himself by reading all the art books at the Philadelphia Library and studying the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
After serving three years in the Army in the Pacific during World War II, he became interested in framing, but found American framers to be dauntingly secretive about important techniques like carving and gilding. The experience led him to decide never to patent his designs.
He went to Paris on the GI Bill with Barbara Boichick, a painter whom he married in 1949. He studied painting in the atelier of Fernand Leger and apprenticed himself to several framers.
Returning to New York in 1951, he opened Kulicke Frames. He also became friends with Abstract Expressionist painters like Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline, who urged him to design thin frames that would be suitable for their work.
His welded aluminum frame was created in 1956 when the Museum of Modern Art approached him for a frame to use for traveling exhibitions. In 1960 he developed the Lucite frame for the Modern's photography department. A floating frame he designed for Knoll Associates, the furniture company, in the late 1950s was used when the Modern, to some art lovers' consternation, replaced the older, bulkier frames on many of its best-known masterpieces after its 1984 expansion.
But Mr. Kulicke considered painting his life's work. He said that while in Paris in the late '40s, he became so discouraged by Leger's emphasis on large scale and bold compositions that he stopped painting. He did not start again until 1957, after the World House art gallery brought him 300 paintings by Giorgio Morandi to be framed. The small Morandi paintings of groups of bottles gave Mr. Kulicke the confidence to work small with modest subjects. He had his first New York show at the Allan Stone Gallery in 1953.
Around 1970, Mr. Kulicke left Kulicke Frames, which was taken over by his wife, whom he divorced, and his father-in-law. In 1968, after years of experimenting, he perfected the granulation technique, which had been used from antiquity to the 11th century and periodically revived by artisans who did not share its secrets.
Mr. Kulicke leaves his wife, Pam Sheehan of Manhattan; his son, Michael, of Mount Bethel, Pa.; his daughter, Fredricka Kulicke of Parsippany, N.J.; his brother, F.W. Kulicke of Horsham, Pa.; and a granddaughter.
