The New Frick is the Best of the Old School

As the old master art world has shrunk in prominence in recent years, the trend has been countered by the creative vitality of an institution that may have seemed least likely to harbor new initiatives: New York’s Frick Collection. The beloved mansion with its palmy garden court and collection of European masterpieces by the likes of Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Fragonard has always been an oasis of beauty within the city’s frenetic art scene, a place where visitors came to contemplate key works rather than to negotiate new academic or political plotlines. Most were content that things never changed.

Then, a surprising thing happened. Under the directorship of Ian Wardropper, the Frick hired ambitious, young curators who had fresh ideas about how to present the collection. Online programming and publications took new directions, frequently focusing on the social contexts from which the museum’s holdings emerged. These curators began telling new stories about the museum’s history, even addressing the questionable character of its founder, Henry Clay Frick. In 2021, the collection moved temporarily to the Whitney’s old Brutalist space on Madison Avenue. There, the Frick began to present female old masters, like Rosalba Carriera, as well contemporary artists of color, like Barkley Hendricks, tying together art and issues past and present.

At Frick Madison, viewers could study the Frick’s masterworks as they might in a more typical museum: organized by time and place, and without the occasionally distracting décor of a mansion. These hangs revealed new perspectives on a well-known collection, but they also helped set the stakes for the most ambitious project of all: the museum’s enlargement.

The reopening of the Frick Collection after a multiyear renovation and expansion by Selldorf Architects with Beyer Blinder Belle thus serves as the proper occasion to reassess what a jewel box museum of canonical European masterpieces means today.

Upon entering, one is reminded that the Frick is very special, with the sumptuousness of the original museum presentation on full display. Now, however, a resplendent statement of the first Gilded Age is supplemented by the quiet luxury of the second. Selldorf’s gray-toned billionaire bunker aesthetic does not always do favors to art (as at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art), but its elegant restraint works well here, its quietude complementing the splendor.

In the newly built spaces, there is a confidence of taste so secure as to appear timeless. This refinement would likely seem intimidating were it not for the warmth of certain touches, such as the veined marbles of the cantilevered staircase or the curvaceous walls and shimmery surfaces of the underground auditorium. With a new restaurant and shop, the Frick now seeks to coddle us in unprecedented fashion.

Beyond a new exhibition space (not yet open) and a handsome gallery for the Frick’s small but significant old master drawings (in this inaugural hang, check out the poetic landscape by Claude Lorraine), the novelty of the reopened museum is focused upstairs in the Frick family’s former bedrooms, where the museum subsequently housed its curatorial offices. Now, this series of intimate, if occasionally prosaic spaces are open to the public. Looking like the freshened rooms of a dowager hotel, they contain some well-known treasures and some little-known surprises. One room is dedicated to the collection’s gold ground paintings, championed by Mr. Frick’s daughter, Helen Clay Frick. The museum’s Impressionists and Northern Renaissance paintings also enjoy separate accommodations, with most of the upstairs rooms tending to “specialize” in one category of art or another.

Unlike downstairs, where works continue to be arranged according to an alluring, but obscure aesthetic and domestic calculus, the new upstairs galleries aspire to museological correctness. A whole group of rarely seen Barbizon pictures occupies the Frick family’s old breakfast room, while in a former guest room, upright cases display the Sher collection of European medals (Featuring rare works by Pisanello among others, this display represents a major addition to the city’s presentation of European sculpture). Supplementing the collection’s ever-growing strength in the decorative arts, a gallery now offers up Sidney Knafel’s gift of European faience, while another passage features early Viennese Du Paquier porcelain. There is even a space dedicated to Winthrop Kellogg Edey’s bequest of clocks and watches, which were previously sprinkled around the museum.

Few, if any, of the monographic galleries upstairs can vie with the stately grandeur and artistic riches of those downstairs. Nevertheless, they contain moments of pure curatorial poetry, as with the Frick’s little Watteau flanked by two Constable cloud studies under a vault of azure and grotesqueries. Returned to its original location upstairs in Mrs. Frick’s boudoir, François Boucher’s boiseries painted for Madame de Pompadour look better than ever.

Those who were anxious about the preservation of the beauty of the museum’s iconic downstairs spaces will be pleased. Although some paintings have moved around, most, including the Gainsboroughs and Turners, have found themselves back in their long-established positions. These rooms feel mostly the same as they did, and remain the heart of the museum—at times with the welcome addition of contemporary art. Delicate porcelain plants and flowers by the sculptor Vladimir Kanevsky complement rather than disrupt their setting. Marvels of naturalistic simulation, they cause viewers to wonder whether they are artworks at all or simply cuttings from the Frick’s gardens.

Despite these contemporary additions, the new Frick, enveloped by luxurious fabrics and rich furnishings, suggests a vision that is increasingly felt to be old-fashioned and elitist. Following Frick tradition, there are no wall labels: if one needs to identify an artist or understand a work’s context, one must consult the nameplates on the gilded frames or an app. Unframed by political and historical perspectives, the works exude the authority of classics, outside of place and time.

Whatever insights it afforded, there was often something stark, even clinical, about the Frick Madison hang. Some art prospered, some didn’t. But the contrast between experiences there and in the renewed mansion is instructive. Whereas the collection’s masterpiece, Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert seemed to fill its so-called chapel at Frick Madison, projecting into the space its sublime tranquility, back at the mansion it must share its room not only with other masterpieces (Titian’s Man with a Red Hat, El Greco’s St. Jerome, Holbein’s Sr. Thomas More), but also with major furniture and objects d’art—mere bric-a-brac by comparison.

Being free of didactic narratives, the traditional hang has an unrecognized strength, too. Artworks respond to each other in unexpected ways, allowing formal semblances to resonate between them. Unmoored from time and place, they prompt stimulating comparisons. Indeed, the ground floor rooms are something like a choose your own adventure book: one turns to encounter any number of works with purpose or at random. Here a pair of lovers speaking by a window, there a world-weary painter seated as it were on a throne.

At the Frick, in fact, the sheer pleasure of looking has never been far from view. During the pandemic, the museum led the charge in creating online programming, using YouTube to bring a work from its collection once a week into our locked-down homes. Wielding specialty drinks, curators Aimee Ng and Xavier Salomon took turns awakening us to artworks that we were longing to see in person. In its contemplative but worldly way, the resulting series, Cocktails with a Curator, made the thoughtful delectation of art possible during quarantine, if only virtually.

Like no other museum, the Frick Collection has constantly raised questions about the role of art in life, offering everyone the privileged vantage that only princes, popes, and oligarchs could otherwise claim. The Frick is special not because it speaks to the world as it is but rather because it helps us imagine what the world should be like. It offers a dream of art, where images enchant as much as instruct. Thus, a museum that sought to absolve its founder of his considerable sins now works to lessen the burden of our own. Yet, while openly recognizing more about its past and the contemporary world swirling all around, today’s Frick is more precious than it has ever been. What insights and pleasures might be revealed when we make our claim of this unharried and unhurried contemplation? Before these questions, other New York museums fall silent: the answers belong to the Frick alone.