The Frick Collection, on East Seventieth Street, is, by so many miles, the finest small city museum—less self-consciously eccentric than London’s Sir John Soane museum, broader in scope and more distinguished than Paris’s Jacquemart-André—that its return after a few years away for renovation is a rare blessing in a time short on them. The collection never had any set program, beyond housing Old Master pictures bought by the industrialist Henry Clay Frick with the nudging of the era’s shrewdest tag team: the art historian Bernard Berenson and the dealer Joseph Duveen. But, walking through the place ahead of its official opening, on April 17th, one is reminded—both by one’s eyes and by the new director, Axel Rüger—that the collection does bend toward a point. With scarcely any nudes or still-lifes, it turns on businessmen, bureaucrats, and bishops: rich men dressed for work.
Holbein’s Thomas Cromwell looks like a fastidiously evil Cabinet minister who would never accidentally add a journalist to his text chain; his Sir Thomas More looks like Laurence Olivier made up to play Sir Thomas More. Even St. Francis, caught in ecstasy by Bellini, has his comfortable office-hermitage behind him, as though he has stepped away from his desk just long enough to receive the stigmata. Frick’s people are people like Frick: men of power and influence. Hercules, the ultimate man of power, is, if anything, overdressed in Veronese’s “Choice Between Virtue and Vice”—a callow youth, with an uncanny resemblance to Aaron Paul in “Breaking Bad,” in a tailored silk suit. (He seems, like most of us, to be struggling manfully toward Virtue, though Vice clearly has him in her grip.)
The essentials of the Frick’s renovation involve the big things dear to institutions and their architects: a near-doubling of space, an expansive shop, and a Danny Meyer café. Key to all this is a remarkably unostentatious new addition by Annabelle Selldorf, in collaboration with the firm Beyer Blinder Belle. Its architectural showpiece is a grand, hyper-marbled, slightly anachronistic Deco-style staircase. (A new auditorium replaces the cozy but acoustically flawed chamber garden.)
For the picture-seeking visitor, however, the most affecting changes are quieter. The skylights in the great West Gallery—the one with Rembrandt’s “The Polish Rider” and his self-portrait, not to mention the two Turners of two harbors—have been refurbished and cleaned, and though the effect is subtle, it’s real: the light is both brighter and more diffuse, ideal for seeing pictures. More significant still is the way the new design makes the Frick look like a home again. When the Gilded Age architect Thomas Hastings put up the mansion, in 1914, it was conceived as a residence for the family as well as for the collection. (Frick had an equally grand mansion in Pittsburgh, where he had made his fortune in steel.) Then, just five years later, Frick died, followed by his wife, Adelaide, a dozen years after that, and the architect John Russell Pope oversaw the conversion of the structure into a museum and library. In this design, which opened in 1935, the grand rooms downstairs were what mattered. Now, for the first time, the second floor, where the Frick family actually lived, is open to the public, redesigned to reflect the domestic atmosphere and display some of the original hangings once in place there.
For instance, François Boucher’s eighteenth-century paintings of toddlers engaged in the work of scientists, artists, and philosophers previously formed an odd parenthetical downstairs. Now they are back where they began, as boudoir paintings (perhaps originally intended for Madame de Pompadour’s circle), reinstalled in Adelaide Frick’s sitting room. Art cycles in and out of fashion, and nothing could have been less suited to twentieth-century taste than Boucher’s chocolate-box cherubs. Yet they feel oddly attuned to our own moment, resonating with the work of Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and John Currin, with their own peculiar blend of the saccharine and the satirical. Boucher’s enfants practice the arts and sciences both as a jest—a child of five can do this—and as an Enlightenment homage to the unclouded natural mind. Nowhere is the dream of pastoral harmony regained through scientific knowledge more beautifully realized than in Boucher’s nocturne of a cherub, telescope in hand, contemplating the moon.
No less striking is the revelation that the Italian Quattrocento paintings, long an energizing presence in the downstairs galleries, were largely the acquisitions of Frick’s daughter Helen, the future doyenne of the adjoining Frick Art Research Library, where this writer was once woefully employed. These paintings, with their bold color and crisp columnar forms, previously served as a sorbet course amid the Baroque chiaroscuro. Now relocated to a small gallery of their own in Helen’s upstairs bedroom, they may be missed below, but their new arrangement clarifies the broader evolution of taste. By the nineteen-twenties, with Frick already gone, the Quattrocento had been fully embraced by Fifth Avenue connoisseurs as equal to what followed.
For the first time, the lighting is strong enough and the space intimate enough that one can appreciate the matchless delicacy and wistful grace of Filippo Lippi’s “Annunciation”—Lippi being the most Pre-Raphaelite in feeling of all painters who actually preceded Raphael—alongside Piero della Francesca’s bright-red “Saint John the Evangelist,” a fireman for the faith. The strong, clear, almost naïve Quattrocento manner—with its astonishing pace of invention, its decade-by-decade advances in perspective, atmosphere, and optical finesse—once played off the polished mastery of van Dyck and Holbein. That contrast is gone, but the gathering together of these works offers its own kind of education.
The temporary relocation of the Frick during the past few years to the brutalist building on Madison Avenue that formerly housed the Whitney offered certain severe pleasures and austere revelations: St. Francis, placed next to the architect Marcel Breuer’s arrow-shaped, hyper-modernist trapezoidal window, seemed at home, and to be drawing cleansing energy from the forms of modern minimalism. Still, the overwhelming emotion on visiting the original location is gratitude for the familiar pictures in their familiar spaces. You come back downstairs at the new Frick, as at the old, to one perfect room and two perfect paintings. The perfect room is that oval gallery where four Whistlers once hung and now hang again, including the matchless portrait of Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac—the original Baron de Charlus in Proust—bearing the Whistlerian title “Arrangement in Black and Gold.” Richard Avedon used to say that everything he knew about fashion, about the beautiful surfaces of society, could be found in this painting, along with its feminine counterpart: the narrow portrait of the gossamer-clad Mrs. Frances Leyland (“Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink”). Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open. Avedon, having first glimpsed the portraits at the age of twelve, returned to them regularly until his death, at eighty-one. They remain: four wraiths of fashion, studies in the chic of attenuation, so flat that one feels they could be rolled up, like Peter Pan’s shadow, each night when the museum closes.
The other singular painting, of course, is Rembrandt’s self-portrait of 1658. When I was starting out, a notably unskilled employee at the Frick, I would sneak downstairs to look at it. When you’re young, it seems a study in dignity sought and achieved, a portrait of a man imbued with enviable, tragic self-knowledge, like Hamlet or Richard II in the last act. When you’re older, the elements of dress-up and sheer exhaustion—you look at, rather than in, those eyes—become more apparent. The circles and shadows of the subject’s aging are sharper even than the authority of his gaze. And yet the painting’s marriage of majesty and melancholy remains undiminished. The work is all the more moving in light of Rembrandt’s circumstances at the time. Not long before, he had declared bankruptcy, having lived beyond his means in ways that painters of the Dutch Republic were not expected to—owning a grand house, amassing an Old Master collection that, ironically, would have rivalled the paintings now surrounding his portrait in the West Gallery. He had lost them all. Sadness permeates the picture, but so does defiance.
At the Frick, thoughts inevitably circle back to the vexed questions of wealth and commerce, and their role in making, collecting, and commodifying art. Frick was the embodiment of much that was wrong with the plutocrats of his time, being an exploiter of immigrant labor, a union-crusher—a man Emma Goldman sent her lover to try to assassinate. But the Rembrandt offers a compensatory and critical view. Coming of age in a Holland that was one of the first truly modern commercial societies—where feudal overlordship had vanished more completely than it had anywhere else in Europe—he reminds us that an artist can carve out a life of pleasure and defiance in a culture that might otherwise obliterate him. Living beyond one’s means is, in its way, the artist’s majestic revenge against the rich. The essential contract of commercial cultures, then as now, is that in exchange for tolerating wealth’s inequalities and its ostentations—the embarrassment of riches, in every sense—we are granted a landscape of shared splendor and a reservoir of growth and energy, however turbulent its course. Rembrandt was a casualty of the same commercial culture that produced the gallery in which his image hangs today, and his self-portrait conveys the richest and most ambivalent emotions that the collection contains.
Oh, and the Frick family’s bowling alley in the basement—where, after a long day of gazing at Piero and Velázquez, the Fricks would retreat to throw a few strikes and spares—is intact and splendid once again. A marvel of frictionless wood and steampunk ingenuity, it features a ball return once operated by a dignified footman, whose job was to sit at the end of the lane, catch the flying pins, and reset them. Though it’s not open to the public, the staff, we’re assured, can use it still. ♦
