The Frick Returns After a Five-Year Closure and a $220 M. Renovation

Jean-Antoine Houdon’s six-foot-tall sculpture Diana the Huntress (1776–95) spent much of the past five years in a box while construction workers hammered away nearby. One of the many treasures owned by the Frick Collection in New York, she stood, lonely and enveloped in wood, in a corner of the vacant museum. Many of her longtime neighbors, mostly Old Master paintings, had been packed away and shipped to the nearby Breuer building, formerly the home of the Whitney Museum, while the Frick underwent a large-scale renovation and expansion. But the terracotta sculpture was simply too fragile to go anywhere else.

And so, Diana stayed behind, idly waiting out her period of confinement while the museum was rebuilt around her. Now, at long last,she has her moment in the sun—without having ever moved an inch.

Diana has been uncased and returned to view, along with plenty of other great European artworks, at the Frick’s refurbished homebase on Fifth Avenue at 70th Street. When the museum officially reopens on April 17, it will be the first time the public has been allowed in since March 2020.

Some $220 million was poured into the renovation surrounding Diana, with an additional $110 million put toward other costs, including the museum’s temporary relocation, so you might expect the Frick to look entirely different. But the most striking thing about the new Frick is that it still feels almost exactly the same. Depending on what you desire from the Frick, that’s either a good thing or a bad thing. If you ask me, it’s a little disappointing.

Change does not come quickly at the Frick, which opened in 1935 as a house museum for the holdings of Henry Clay Frick, an industrialist who amassed a trove of first-class European paintings. (Frick started out small, buying a plain landscape by Pittsburgh painter George Hetzel in 1881, and then expanded his purview to include many acknowledged greats of art history before his death in 1919.) Set in the Upper East Side mansion where the robber baron himself once lived, the museum exudes old-world charm. Jaw-dropping masterpieces by Boucher, Rembrandt, and Vermeer can still be found here, hung in carpeted galleries decked out with plush chairs and satiny drapes.

This is not a museum that could be called youthful—it still has a policy that forbids children under 10, something enforced by almost no other art museum in New York. It’s also not a museum that seems much interested in reinventing itself, which may be why architect Annabelle Selldorf’s renovation is intentionally less of a total overhaul than a quiet revamp.

Her most noticeable interventions can be seen on the second floor, an area that was previously closed to the public. The second floor formerly served as offices to Frick staff members and, before that, as the living quarters of Henry Clay Frick and his wife Adelaide, whose bedroom was located here. And while these spaces are now heavily altered—there’s nary a curator’s desk (or a bed) to be found anymore—they contain nice homages to their past lives. George Romney’s 1785 painting Emma Hart, Later Lady Hamilton, as “Nature”, featuring a smiling woman holding a cocker spaniel, once hung near Frick’s bed, and is now viewable in the very space where Frick would have admired it nightly.

There are plenty of other works up here worth admiring here, too: a ca. 1730 Jean-Siméon Chardin still life, the first painting in that genre ever acquired by the Frick Collection; a 1423–25 Gentile da Fabriano painting of an enthroned Virgin Mary that still sparkles, thanks to its gold leafing; Jean-Étienne Liotard’s Trompe l’Oeil (1771), a painting so exactingly realized that the drawings and plaster reliefs depicted appear three-dimensional. All these works, and many of the others around them, had previously been on view at the Frick, some in galleries where they where they were overshadowed by world-famous masterpieces. Here, because of the extra space afforded to them, these works are hard to ignore.

The point here is the art, not the renovation. Selldorf, whose past credits include galleries for Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner and the building for the Neue Galerie, is known for sculpting spaces that are minimal, stately, and elegant. It’s kind of architecture that plays second fiddle to whatever art it’s hosting. That’s why her revised second floor is such a success—and why her biggest swings elsewhere in the museum, a new staircase made from Breccia Aurora Blue marble and a cavernous below-ground auditorium, don’t quite work. These elements are simply too loud, too keen to announce themselves as expensive and fresh.

But back to the galleries. The first floor appears so similar to its pre-2020 self that one would have to play a game of spot-the-difference to notice any shifts. At the press preview on Tuesday, Selldorf said she had mainly improved crowd flow and illumination, joking that visitors “might not be able to tell where the lights have changed.” (I, for one, could not.)

The beloved Fragonard gallery, filled with the Rococo painter’s ribald allegories of romantic courtship, returns virtually unchanged, as does the exquisite dining room, whose walls are hung with towering portraits by the British painter Thomas Gainsborough. Also back is Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1475–80). Set aside a few minutes to get reacquainted with this work, one of the best pieces of art to be found anywhere in New York, which can now be seen in a new light—literally, thanks to Selldorf’s careful work.

Only a handful of works are new to view at the Frick. One is Giovanni Battista Moroni’s Portrait of a Woman (ca. 1575), in which a leery-eyed woman stares down at her viewer, pressing her lips into the faintest of sneers. The Moroni painting was acquired in 2023; at the time, the museum trumpeted it as the first portrait of a Renaissance woman ever to enter its collection. But there is no such hoopla here. It hangs mutely above two Qing Dynasty vases, all of which go uncaptioned.

The Frick continues to take an old-school approach to the art on view, which is presented sans didactics (as has historically been the case). In the past, the lack of wall text has been a relief: all you needed for an enriching museum experience, the Frick seemed to suggest, was art itself. But more context is now required, especially when it comes to some of the decorative artworks on view. Near the Houdon Diana sculpture, for example, there is an array of Meissen porcelain pieces, including one showing a man—a Chinese man, per the Met, which owns a similar work—holding a flower to an unnaturally big bird. It’s confusing that wares such as this are presented without commentary, and even odder that actual Chinese vases nearby aren’t demarcated from the European porcelains they inspired, centuries later.

Unusually for a reopened museum, the Frick has not rehung its collection, which remains mostly as it has for about a century. That makes the Frick—which doesn’t seem to be bound by the sort of strict everything-remains-as-is founding document seen at other collectors’ museums—quite unlike other institutions in New York. Two years ago, for example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art wholly redid its European paintings galleries, with more works by women and more wall texts referring to race, gender, and colonialism. The Frick, by contrast, seems totally unaffected by the upheaval of the past five years, with neither of those things to boast.

Can the Frick join our times? It certainly tried to do just that during its brief Breuer residency, where one of the presentations, in 2023, was a Barkley Hendricks survey. Here, loaned paintings of Black Americans from the 20th century mingled with portraits of white Europeans by Bronzino, Van Dyck, and Rembrandt from the Frick’s holdings. The show suggested that Hendricks saw the Old Masters anew and implied that we’d be wise to do the same.

The Frick seems not to have heeded its own advice, and that is the biggest shame of this reopened museum. The only contemporary art on view right now by the Ukrainian artist Vladimir Kanevsky, whose sculpted vases filled with porcelain flowers limply refer to floral arrangements shown at the Frick in 1935, the year it opened to the public. This is a museum that has been stunted—it’s trapped in the past. (Three new galleries by Selldorf will be for a slate of special exhibitions that includes some contemporary art programming, but these spaces aren’t open yet.)

The new Frick is the old Frick, for better and for worse. It’s not a museum that offers much in the way of art-historical innovation, but it’s still a pleasant place to while away a rainy afternoon. And besides, you’d have to be a true sourpuss to argue with the sheer magnitude of great art on view. The good news is that, with Selldorf’s expansion, there’s only more of it.