International art collectors and experts alike flock to Olaf Lemke‘s acclaimed store in Berlin, seeking his expertise and trusting his intuition as they choose the perfect historical frame for their paintings. A visit to an important frame gallery owner.
Photos: Klara Johanna Michel
Whether ebony baroque frames with silver fittings, gilded rococo frames, painted or sgraffito Renaissance frames: all this and much more adorns the walls and warehouses of Olaf Lemke. The Berliner is considered one of the important frame dealers in the world. Renowned collectors, gallery owners and art experts, such as the legendary Heinz Berggruen or the married couple Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, and museums such as London‘s National Gallery or the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam entrust their framing to him. Antike Rahmen (Antique Frames) is the name of his store in Berlin-Schöneberg, which has been selling frames of the 15th to early 19th centuries from Italy, Spain, Flanders, Germany and the Netherlands for over six decades.
Lemke knows his business through and through. He learned the trade from the bottom up. It came about by chance, the young-atheart 89-year-old explains in an interview with Dorotheum myART MAGAZINE. His father, a “Nazi sculptor” as Lemke puts it during the Nazi era, became an antiques dealer after the war. A frame maker worked around the corner, where the son, born in 1936, earned his first money at weekends. In 1956, Olaf completed a three-year gilding apprenticeship at the Berlin companies Sprengel & Sohn and Wormuth & Sohn. Through a job advertisement in the magazine Weltkunst, he came across the London company Friedrich Pollak. As a Jew, Pollak had been forced to give up his Berlin business and leave Germany in order to establish the art of framing in England. Lemke spent three years with this international master of his trade, who had no resentment towards him as a German, returning to Berlin, Olaf Lemke founded his own company in 1961.
Olaf Lemke had a close relationship with Vienna, which developed in the early 1960’s. He came across the family business Stiassny, Seilergasse 1, through a Viennese company employee. He paid it a visit on the off chance and acquired a magnificent Régency frame with an illustrious history. This resulted in “a close friendship until death”, according to Olaf Lemke.
Lemke, who had recognized the potential of collecting and restoring historical frames through Pollak, wanted to move away from copying. For a quarter of a century, he travelled through Europe once a year with his wife Johanna, mainly through Spain. They bought hundreds of old frames at a time. “The frames were often painted black, but underneath rosewood or ebony revealed itself in all its glory. We restored a lot. Frames have always been recycled over the centuries.”
Spanish frames are more robust and somewhat coarser in their ornamentation than the Italian ones and are ideal for expressive works, explains daughter Tanja Lemke-Mahdavi, who is the curator of an exhibition of inscribed Renaissance frames on the second floor of the gallery: “One of my father’s skills is that the frame appears almost invisible, but brings out the picture. And he always framed, regardless of the setting. It is important to him that the picture and the frame form a unit.” But it shouldn’t be “too sweet, or too pleasing”, says the expert, “there has to be a tension to it”.
Lemke specialises in reframing Old Master Paintings and Expressionist works. He keeps his hands off original artist-made frames. Reducing or cutting old frames to size is only an last resort for the professional. The frame maker has made one observation over the course of his long career: the higher the quality of the artwork, the more likely it is to be reframed when it changes hands. Olaf Lemke responds to customer requests, but “I have at least 50 percent of the say. I have conquered that over the years: even big collectors and multimillionaires say: ‘I come to you, you have good taste’.”
