In an artistic manor: Review of the reopened Frick – Washington Examiner
The article reviews the recent reopening of The Frick Collection in New York city after a significant renovation costing over $200 million, wich began in March 2020.Originally the home of steel and coal baron Henry Clay Frick, the museum has combined his art collection with architectural elements from various noteworthy architects over time.The renovation, involving about 60 contractors, primarily focused on restoring and upgrading the ancient elements—skylights, lighting, and wall finishes—rather than extensive expansion. while some historic spaces were repurposed, such as the music room, the overall integrity of the structure was maintained.
The expanded museum now includes previously inaccessible areas, turning former family living quarters into galleries, allowing for a reorganization of the artworks that reflects Frick’s original display methods. This includes highlights from artists like Daubigny, Corot, and Degas, with specific attention given to the contributions of women in shaping the collection.
The redesign aims to enhance the visitor experience while celebrating the historical and artistic meaning of the space.the Frick Collection retains its intimate character as a museum within a house, providing a blend of domestic comfort and artistic reverence. The review concludes positively, noting the triumphant balance between modernization and preservation.
In an artistic manor: Review of the reopened Frick
America has fewer grand homes-turned-museums than Europe, for the perfectly simple reason that there have been Americans living grandly for so much less time. New York City has an unusually small number, and most of these bear no resemblance to their original uses. The Frick Collection is different. The museum, overlooking Central Park on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was steel and coal baron Henry Clay Frick’s home and has remained home to his art — and then some. There is a rare accord still at work between the collection and the structures housing them. Frick hired Thomas Hastings to provide suitably grand spaces for his collection, and his daughter, Helen Clay Frick, hired John Russell Pope to do more of the same for its expansion to museum use. Some of the pieces remain exactly where they were in 1919, when Frick died. And, after a more-than-200-million-dollar renovation that began in March of 2020, the place reopened on April 17.
The Frick has returned in excellent form. About 60 contractors labored on the “first comprehensive upgrade of its facilities ever,” upgrading skylights and artificial lighting, refinishing wood, and even reweaving silk walls. The vast majority of this was polishing, so to speak, and the sheen is high. To address concerns first, the project attracted entirely warranted preservationist ire for the demolition of Pope’s wonderful first-floor music room to provide part of the footprint for Selldorf Architects’ expansion. It was literally unclear how they could knit together an expansion otherwise, which was meant to link to Pope’s neighboring Frick Art Research Library. Acknowledging this geometric fact does not require its endorsement.
The more welcome news is that, otherwise, the expansion has settled into the frame of the mansion lightly, with minimal disruption to either the technical historical correctness of the place or even what someone might call its feng shui. Much of the expansion contains back-of-house functions. The new public areas are relatively modest, visible largely in one corner of the museum’s footprint, including a revamp of the building’s 1977 reception hall and a second-floor hall linking to a refreshingly unobtrusive gift shop and new restaurant. Before the public was let back in, word of the number of bars the Frick was seeking to insert, 14, prompted alarm. Happily, there is only one that’s at all perceptible.
Annabelle Selldorf, who designed the expansion, has carried out numerous gallery commissions, usually for contemporary or modern collections. Here, she has shifted from her typical minimalism to a mode that is clearly more historically inflected. There’s a sort of Vienna Secession skylight, and early modern marble and brass stairs that feel inspired by Loos and early Mies. There are also new special exhibition galleries and a large auditorium in a sub-basement, also politely reticent.
The most important element of the project was not addition but restoration. A number of pieces have returned to their original locations: Romney’s portrait of Lady Hamilton, Admiral Nelson’s paramour, has returned to its spot in Frick’s bedroom. Rococo panels by Francois Boucher have returned to their original spot in Adelaide Frick’s boudoir, which required all sorts of work on woodcarving and wallpapers. If you have visited this museum before, at this point you will be wondering, “Wait a second, what boudoir?” That’s because the renovation, importantly, has opened access to the structure’s second floor, which has never been open to the public. These 10 rooms, which once contained the family’s living areas, have just been offices since. They’re now galleries, whose 10-foot heights are well-suited to the display of art that might have been swallowed up on the ground floor, where ceilings are often twice as high.
The new arrangement of works overall is more reflective of Frick’s own habits. He tended to keep more contemporary works upstairs, putting showstoppers on display for guests below. But these then-recent trifles, now back in the breakfast room, are now priceless works by Daubigny, Corot, and Millais. Pieces in other galleries upstairs are often smaller, but the museum made a real effort to ensure they aren’t also-rans. You’ll find such obscure artists as Degas, Monet, and Ingres up there. A gallery of Renaissance Italian pieces by artists such as Duccio and Piero della Francesca collected by Helen Clay Frick has been placed in her former bedroom. There’s also a very fun sight overhead — a hallway ceiling fresco featuring monkeys in various chinoiserie-spirited garb.
There are excellent pieces from Murillo to Guardi brought out of the vaults to fresh display, putting everything in a slightly new and better light. The museum has made a declared effort to accentuate the role of women in shaping the collection — in this case Frick’s wife, Adelaide, and daughter, Helen, who established the museum, both of whom deserve this attention. It has not acceded, in this process, to prevailing activist tide. Amid a sea of curatorial trends which seem mainly intent on slandering art that does not meet diversity imperatives, the Frick remains an island happy to simply celebrate works that are wonderful.
THE AMBITIOUS AND DOOMED THE BRUTALIST
It is difficult to look beyond Rembrandt and Goya and Titian and Veronese and Reynolds, but the renovation has made it all the easier to admire the broader design of these spaces beyond the art. The jaundiced light of aged and intermittently repaired skylights has all become uniform. Artificial lighting is unnoticeable — in other words, perfect. It’s easier than ever to notice the shifts from Hastings’s Beaux-Arts effulgence to Pope’s superb but more restrained neoclassicism in his additions. So much else is sumptuous — the green velvet walls of the West Gallery were rewoven by the same firm in Lyon, France, that provided the originals. There are recreated carpets, drapes, and much else throughout the interior.
The Frick has retained its superb interstitial character as a small-scale museum. It is a museum located largely in a house, not a house museum, but the character is domestic in a way that provides greater comfort than most gallery settings.
Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn.
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