The picture hasn’t been very pretty at Custom Framing Service, a company that Matthew Kutzin runs out of a Van Nuys warehouse.

The company caters to high-end art players who contract to frame works by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Henri Matisse for galleries, collectors and art consultants. And in August 2008, sales stopped – “as if someone flipped a switch,” Kutzin said.

The economy – the real estate collapse, the banking crisis – cut his business in half.

“We were busy in August, and near the end of August the phone stopped ringing and the work stopped coming in,” he said.

But Custom Framing made it through the crisis by laying off half the staff and securing emergency financing. Now Kutzin is poised for recovery.

In the years before the recession hit, Custom Framing typically did between $75,000 and $100,000 in sales each month. With galleries seeing sales drop by 50 percent and auction houses selling fewer works at lower prices than just a few years ago, it’s no wonder business slowed.

“A lot of the galleries are facing cash-flow problems because of the recession so that tremendously affects the galleries being able to pay out the service people,” said Randy Sommer, co-owner of Acme, a contemporary art gallery in the Miracle Mile area that uses Kutzin’s services.

But after a tough year, by October, Kutzin was back in black. Business started picking up as suddenly as it had faded away.

“We will be making money,” said Kutzin, 55, who runs his 5,500-square-foot shop on Oxnard Street, where the frames are assembled. “We got busy as suddenly as we got unbusy.”

Getting started

Kutzin got into the business in 1979, when he moved to Los Angeles and began working for his brother, Paul Kutzin, who owned the fledgling Van Nuys framing business. Kutzin had graduated from Drew University in his home state of New Jersey but had no art background – he majored in political science. His brother paid him $150 a week.

“It was very hard work; we worked insane hours,” he said. “I learned by being in it, through osmosis. It’s a knowledge of how to handle the artwork, how to hinge it, how to tastefully choose a frame.”

The business grew. By the mid-1980s, the company had found a way to work with consultants – those hired by hotels, law firms and other businesses to decorate various facilities.

Times were good, and Kutzin decided to buy out his brother. The long-term buyout process, which cost Kutzin less than $100,000, began in 1986 but wasn’t completed until 1989 just as a recession was hitting.

While business slowed, the company moved to its current warehouse space and emerged from the recession with a new focus: gallery business, which now accounts for three-quarters of Custom Framing’s orders. Kutzin said he learned how to make deals in that world and he also got “good at handling high-end, blue-chip fine art.”

In the mid-1990s, Kutzin snagged an important client, Gemini G.E.L., a family of businesses that includes a Melrose Avenue fine-art print publisher, and a New York art gallery that sells works by artists such as David Hockney and John Baldessari.

Art adviser Joni Weyl, who owns the New York gallery, uses Custom Framing for gallery pieces and for her separate consulting business. Kutzin also works with the print company, which is owned by Weyl’s husband, Sidney Felsen.

Weyl said she likes working with Kutzin because of his hands-on management style.

“He deals directly with clients,” said Weyl, who also noted that she appreciates that Kutzin’s prices are lower than those of other framing companies.

Big picture

Kutzin isn’t alone in feeling the hurt that the recession put on the art world.

At Jerry Solomon Custom Picture Framing in Culver City, which caters to auction houses and local museums, business also fell by about half.

Company owner Jerry Solomon said he also had to cut staff, from about 65 to about 30. He works mostly with auction houses and museums.

Andrea Fiuczynski, president of Christie’s Los Angeles, said business has picked up at auction houses, but only after the steep decline of the previous year. She said that Hong Kong and New York auctions in November and another in London in December all did well. Christie’s Los Angeles contracts Solomon for framing services.

Solomon doesn’t see Kutzin as a competitor because his operation is so much larger. But Kutzin said his smaller shop – and his Van Nuys rent – allows him to keep prices about 20 percent below those of Solomon and other comparable framers.

Now that business is coming back, Kutzin has been able to hire two employees in the last few months, boosting Custom Framing’s ranks to seven employees.

“Old clients are coming back,” he said. “Galleries are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Kutzin is once again handling 300 to 400 frames a month – up from a low of about 90 a month. And he plans to expand the visibility of the company with a Web site, which he expects to have up and running in the next six months. He is even considering raising some prices to deal with increased costs of some raw materials, such as aluminum.

He still finds pleasure in the most fun part of the job: getting up close and personal with art.

“It’s a different way of looking at art. It’s more intimate,” he said.

Custom Framing Service

FOUNDED: 1976

HEADQUARTERS: Van Nuys

CORE BUSINESS: Picture frame and art display manufacturing

EMPLOYEES: 7 (up from 5 in 2009)

GOAL: Return to prerecessionary sales level, and then increase sales by 25 percent

THE NUMBERS: Sales fell 50 percent from highs of $100,000 per month before rising at the end of 2009