Alfred Hecht (1907 - January 4, 1991) was a picture framemaker with store
at 326 King's Road, Chelsea, from 1947 to 1974.
Queer Places:
324A King's Rd, Chelsea, London SW3 5UH
326 King's Rd, Chelsea, London SW3 5UH
Alfred Hecht (1907 - January 4, 1991) was a picture framemaker with store
at 326 King's Road, Chelsea, from 1947 to 1974.
Alfred Hecht came to England in the mid-1920s and at first tried metal broking and the textiles business. Following the Second World War, he traded as an art dealer (he was listed as such in 1947).
At about this time Hecht set up his well-known Kings Road framing business. He undertook framing work for artists such Ceri Richards, Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon (making his trademark gilt and glazed frames), and in particular for the dealer, Frank Lloyd Fisher at the Marlborough Gallery, setting almost a house style of modern hefty gilt frames. He advised artists and introduced coloured mounts that would become a ‘Chelsea’ signature. In 1955 it was the framer who asked Peter Pollock and Paul Danquah to take Bacon in as a lodger at their flat where he stayed for the next six years and was photographed by Cecil Beaton.
According to Jim Bradford, a former employee, Hecht was a most agreeable employer, whose framing work was based on 'self-appointed good taste', rather than on set ideas on how to go about framing. The paper conservator, Jane McAusland, has left an account of her first studio, which Hecht let her have for a year, c.1970, in two rooms on his premises, ‘above a gilder, who spent his time diligently day after day gilding large frames for Francis Bacon’. Hecht employed the Canadian painter, William Kurelek, as a framer in 1955.
While Hecht was no longer listed in trade directories after 1974, he continued to undertake some framing work, including for the 1977 Graham Sutherland exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. He was Sutherland’s framemaker from 1953 or before and was in the course of sitting to the artist for his portrait at the time of Sutherland's death in 1980.
Hecht was described by Roy Strong as 'a very superior framer who lives over his shop in the Kings Road'. Hecht enjoyed entertaining, as the diaries of the Labour politician, Jennie Lee, tell: 'Alfred Hecht, who liked describing himself as a picture frame-maker, was indeed a picture frame-maker, but in addition he had the gift of recognising genius long before the general public came to recognise it. In his home we spent happy carefree evenings with artist friends, some of whose early promise came to nothing, while others, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Francis Bacon, were to reach the highest pinnacles of their profession.'
Hecht was a collector and acquired works by Francis Bacon, Massimo Campigli and Marino Marini from Erica Brausen’s Hanover Gallery and was friends with Aneurin Bevan and his wife Jennie Lee and Arnold, later Lord Goodman and the interior decorators Kenneth Partridge and Geoffrey Bennison. Hecht was a gay campaigner for law reform but found that many of the homosexuals he knew were less than forthcoming. Most were happy to enjoy the freedom that wealth and connections bestowed – so long as you kept ‘mum’. He complained “how can I say I am a German-Jewish homosexual?”, to which the interior decorator Partridge, replied “As if everyone didn’t know, dear.” Such camp flippancy was all very well but it merely points up the hiding in plain sight that was allowed as long as you were amusing but knew your place. He pressed artists to donate pictures to be sold quietly via Peter Wilson at Sotheby’s, to support the Homosexual Law Reform Society, but how much success he had is not known. According to the Campaigner Anthony Grey he did give several hundred pounds to the campaign but his pushy nature did not win friends. He also established a gay film society from offices in Shaftsbury Avenue. One of his apprentices was Stephen Jones whose welded and polished aluminium and polished brass frames and particularly Perspex box frames became a signature style with pop artists associated with John Kasmin’s gallery in the 1960s and 70s.
Hecht knew John and Myfanwy Piper well and they were the residual legatees of his estate; his letters to the Pipers, 1955-69, are in the Tate Archive, together with estate correspondence, 1991-2, and photocopies of his will and codicil, inventories and valuations.
‘When I die,' Hecht used to say, 'let my epitaph be: "Alfred Hecht, the man who invented the coloured mount".' (Derek Granger, obituary for Alfred Hecht, The Independent 12 January 1991).
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