San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Peerless framer was trusted to enhance S.F.’s art treasures
As a master picture framer, Ed Green’s goal was to select a raw piece of wood and create a quadrangle that no viewer would notice.
“I don’t think what I do is art,” Green once said. “I consider it high craft in the support of art.”
But his clients and colleagues, ranging from major art collectors to gallery owners and conservators, considered what he did art of the highest order.
“Ed had no peer among other framers,” said James Bernstein, a San Francisco painting conservator. “There is no one who did what Ed did.”
For 40 years, Green never had his name on a sign of any of his studios. He didn’t need one. He had all the work he could handle, right up until his birthday, March 11, when Green was found dead in his home and studio in San Francisco.
He had fallen during the night and hit his head, said his sister Liz Wiggins, noting that her brother lived alone and the isolation of the pandemic had been difficult for him.
The cause of Green’s death remains unknown, pending the coroner’s report. He was 76.
“Ed would have liked the
dimension of being born and dying on the same date,” Wiggins said. “He liked things seamless. When you look at his frames, the corners will appear seamless.”
Green built frames for major exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hess Collection in Napa Valley, among other institutional clients. But mainly he worked for private collectors who saw the longterm value in an expensive frame that could hang on a wall for years or decades.
“Ed had a soulful poet’s essence,” said Gwen Terpstra, owner of 60Six Gallery. “He earned a reputation as a master craftsman who made absolutely perfect things.”
To do so, Green would take careful notes and measurements while visiting the work to be framed, notes he stored in looseleaf binders, forming a unique record of the art market in San Francisco. He left behind dozens of these binders, and one alone, from 2014 to 2018, details framing of pictures by Ed Ruscha, Cy Twombly, John Baldessari, Kara Walker, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Larry Sultan, Nan Goldin, Frank Gehry, Garry Winogrand, Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet.
“There is a personality and an identity to a handmade frame, and it comes from the person who made it,” said Tamara Freedman, owner of Spot Design, another custom framer. “An Ed Green frame has its own presence and demands a level of respect. Most frames don’t do that, but Ed’s do.”
Tiburon collector and author Chara Schreyer used Green exclusively for 25 years. Her art movers would deliver a piece to him, and she’d never ask for a progress report as Green figured out the right wood for artists ranging from László MoholyNagy to JeanMichel Basquiat. It could be a month before she heard back from him that her order was ready.
“I trusted him completely,” Schreyer said. “He is an architect by training, and there was never a time when he did not deliver a frame to my satisfaction — and that is for 200 framed works.” Edward Benton Green was born March 11, 1945, in Union
Town, Penn. His father, Samuel Alan Green, was a chemist for DuPont and raised his family in Claymont, Del., near Wilmington, where DuPont is headquartered. At Claymont High School, Green ran the 880 (halfmile) on the track team and played basketball. He was also an aspiring fine artist who illustrated the cover of the school’s yearbook for 1963, his senior year.
After entering the University of Delaware to study architecture, he was subject to the draft lottery, and drew a low number that compelled him to join the U.S. Navy before the Army had a chance to get him. He served as a quartermaster on the ship Spiegel Grove in the Mediterranean.
Upon his release from the Navy, Green started a cabinetmaking business and got married. Neither endeavor lasted, and around 1980, Green and a friend took a crosscountry drive to San Francisco. He did not accompany the friend on the return trip.
Green’s first business venture was glazing and painting miniature ceramic tiles and Victorian veneer mantle pieces to decorate interiors of dollhouses. But that venture did not prosper.
After helping a friend build out a gallery space, he started framing the art to hang in the space, and he was so good at it that he opened Ed Green Fine Art Framing.
His shop on a pier in China Basin was demolished to make way for the new Giants baseball park, so he moved south on Third Street in Dogpatch. That building was also demolished to make way for condos, and after losing two studios, he decided to work out of his rentcontrolled onebedroom unit on the top floor of an apartment building overlooking Dolores Park.
When Freedman was trying to learn the art of custom framing in the early 1980s, she visited Green at his shop. He worked slowly and spoke slowly to be in sync with his work, she remembered. Green would use the same piece of wood for the entire frame so that the grain continued around the corners, and there was no hardware involved. The corners were splined using tiny triangles of wood sanded until they become part of the frame. He’d use maybe 15 coats of lacquer and sand between each coat.
“By they time he was done you had this frame that was perfect — silky and smooth, not clunky or heavy,” Bernstein said. “It was just right for the artwork and made the art come forward and sing.”
Artist Nicole Phungrasamee Fein first visited Green’s studio when he was framing a large painting by Richard Diebenkorn for SFMOMA in the mid1990s. Green could tell a story about each thing he built, including the framework to hide the support system for the hats worn by Val Diamond in “Beach Blanket Babylon.”
He built the furniture for Fein’s studio near Dolores Park and also built the kitchen cabinets, a desk and her drawing tools. He also built a bed frame for her son, Felix, to whom he became a combination unclegodfather. Fein would take Felix, now 16, to Green’s shop on Sundays to learn woodworking from the master.
“Ed was sensitive and empathetic, with a very discerning eye,” Fein said. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am or the person I am without having known Ed.”
In his own home, he built the furniture and frames for the artwork, and, for his New Year’s Day open house, he “built” cioppino, based on the Rose Pistola recipe. He’d buy shellfish at the Ferry Building and make his base in advance to simmer in the tiny kitchen. As each guest arrived, the custom framer would customize each bowlful, dropping in crab, shrimp and scallops as that guest watched.
“He was what I call an
said Schreyer, quoting her native German. “It means one of a kind. He was a big talent but also a very humble person.”
Survivors include a brother, Sam Green of Belfast, Maine; sister, Liz Wiggins of Elkton, Md.; three nephews; and two nieces.
His ashes will be sprinkled around his favorite olive tree at an undisclosed location.