Robert Kulicke’s Second Act
No second-act artist more captivates me than the late still-life painter Robert M. Kulicke.
His is a Horatio Alger story… with a poignant twist.
Kulicke became rich and famous in the late 1950s, not as a painter, but a frame-maker.
He designed all three of the 20th century’s most-used picture frames—the sectional metal frame, the “floater,” and the “plexibox”—and built nearly all of the frames you see today in art museums worldwide.
His name in museum circles was legion.
But colossal success as a frame-maker was a consolation prize.
Kulicke wanted to be a painter.
As a teenager, he had studied painting at two prestigious art schools, his courses interrupted only by World War II, when he served in the South Pacific.
Like all serious painters at mid-century, Kulicke moved to Paris the war, tapping the GI Bill to pay for a master class being taught by the renowned Cubist painter Fernand Léger.
During an especially harsh critique, Léger told Kulicke he should quit painting. His paintings were to small, too dainty, too quiet. “Kulicke, you have no talent,” he pronounced through a translator.
Kulicke was crushed. He put away his brushes and palette. Out of necessity, he soon drifted into an apprenticeship with a Parisian frame-maker, where he discovered a new passion: ornate frames.
Kulicke learned frame-making so quickly and well that within just a year he opened his own firm in Manhattan—the one that, within five years, would make him prosperous and a household name among curators.
Still Life. Giorgio Morandi.
As a painter, absolution came to Kulicke in 1956, when his firm won a contract to frame 330 still-lifes by the then-unknown Giorgio Morandi.
Spending so many hours with the Italian artist’s work convinced him he’d found the mentor the arrogant Léger could never be. Kulicke took up his brushes again, rediscovering his passion for painting intimate still-lifes in the style of the 17th century.
Kulicke’s paintings were small—10 x 10 inches and smaller; his signature subject was the pear.
He returned to the pear again and again “to get it right,” he once told a writer. “In art you never hit what you’re aiming at,” he told another, “but the difference may not be downward.”
Kulicke called himself an “intimist” and said his work combined “Zen philosophy and Medieval art.”
During his lifetime, he mounted major exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco, and sold still-life paintings to The Met in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, and the Victoria & Albert in London.
Kulicke died in December 2007, beloved by collectors and friends the world over.
NOTE: Thanks go to my teacher Milena Spasic for introducing Robert M. Kulicke’s work to me.
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