As Peter Schjeldahl recently observed in The New Yorker, those who love the Frick Collection can feel strangely possessive of it. That may have to do with its scale; the fact that it doesn’t take more than a handful of visits to know the topography of the place, and to feel quite at home in its pretty plushness. (The museum is small, but not that small; after initial additions in the 1930s—when it was converted from a private house into a public gallery—the Frick was expanded in the 1970s and again in 2011.) It also helps that while things would occasionally move around, the Frick rarely makes loans, so a favorite piece was generally right where you’d left it. One found the Fragonards in the Fragonard Room; the Bouchers in the Boucher Room; English portraits in the Dining Room and the Library; and the Rembrandts, Halses, Turners, and more in the West Gallery. (That’s where Grace periodically met her father in The Undoing—seated before Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet-Boat: Evening—although the bench that they conspired on doesn’t normally face that way.)
Admittedly, I harbor certain proprietary feelings myself. My first visits to the Frick were under my own steam (I was already 17), and the mansion had the feeling of a place that I’d conjured. A very keen participant in its education programs—particularly, classes that had us look at and discuss a single work of art for an hour—I’d soon seen parts of the museum that most people didn’t; sketching in both the gardens, studying a Dürer on the roped-off second floor, and using the ancient bowling alley in the basement. I was around often enough that when I returned for a visit in college, a security guard let me cut the admissions line. (This made me terribly smug.)
Of course, the Frick’s eponymous collection—predominantly of Old Masters—is famously, indubitably good, but the Frick itself is something of a Gesamtkunstwerk. The drapes and faded carpets, the mantelpieces and gilded mirrors, the old furniture and oak-paneled walls, even the vague dampness of the Garden Court—everything seemed of a piece; the ground, as it were, very nearly as compelling as the subjects. (Schjeldahl captures my feelings on this exactly, writing: “I’ve pitied ambitious curators there, contending with a collection that is both heterogeneous and, as installed, perfect. What needs doing, beyond keeping the lights on?”)
So the collection’s temporary move into the former Met Breuer—a brooding, brutalist building erected in 1966 to house the Whitney Museum—is a shock to the senses in every way. (The Frick’s normal building, on East 70th Street, is undergoing a much-delayed—and somewhat contentious—renovation by architect Annabelle Selldorf; both it and the neighboring Frick Art Reference Library are due to reopen next year.) The space is bare, bare, bare; and in a scheme devised by curators Xavier F. Salomon, Aimee Ng, Giulio Dalvit, and former Curator of Decorative Arts Charlotte Vignon (with help from Stephen Saitas, the Frick’s designer, and input from Selldorf), the art is organized strictly by region and roughly by chronology: works from Northern Europe occupy the second floor; ones from Spain and Italy (along with bronzes, enamels, clocks, porcelains, and Indian carpets), the third floor; and French and British art, the fourth floor. (Also, while the Flora Bar is sadly gone, the Frick will, for the first time ever, offer refreshments: During regular museum hours—10:00am to 6:00pm from Thursday through Sunday—a coffee bar furnished by Joe Coffee will operate from the ground level.)
If the result is overwhelming at first blush—this is, in many ways, not the museum that closed its doors a year ago—it grows on you fairly quickly. After whizzing through the press preview, slightly faint from my double-masking and worried about the time (it was a Thursday afternoon), I made a second, much quieter trip one Sunday morning, and it made all the difference. As I’d learned in my classes at the Frick, huddled near a Constable or Degas, it can take a few minutes for an artwork to “settle”; and the same was true in this case.
At Frick Madison, as it’s been styled, the collection comes directly to the fore; both revealing its richesse and its oversights. (Focused on the tastes of one very rich steel-and-coke man, the collection is, all things considered, pretty narrow in scope.) Moving through the galleries, with their staid gray backdrops and minimal identifying details—like on 70th Street, there are no wall texts here, so you’d do well to use the Frick’s audio guide on the Bloomberg Connects app—one can’t help but see the works differently. Ignore, if you can, the “dings” from the elevator, and you just may find yourself absorbed by a piece that once rather faded into the damask. There’s no jostling for space in this building, or competing for attention with a molding or a Renaissance-era couch. The breathing room abounds, serving up an altogether different kind of splendor.
While working on the building, Breuer told the Whitney’s leadership that a Manhattan museum “should transform the vitality of the street into the sincerity and profundity of art,” and indeed, he managed to create a sense of lightness and brightness to revitalizing effect. There are, in the old Frick as here, certain obvious highlights: Fragonard’s The Progress of Love panels in full, glorious flower; Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, bathed in the light of one of Marcel Breuer’s famous trapezoidal windows; Rembrandt’s magisterial self-portrait. But quite suddenly, I could hardly tear myself away from Titian’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap; I was dazzled by the red-ringed eyes of the mourners in Gerard David’s The Deposition, and by Hans Holbein’s crazy velvet sleeves in Sir Thomas More; I loved the funny, little faces (and the ducks!) in Turner’s The Harbor of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile, and the curl of Julia, Lady Peel’s hair in a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. And goodness, where had Chardin’s Still Life with Plums, so tidy and splendid, been hiding? And the 17th-century Indian carpets? I’d seen—even studied!—so many of these artworks before, but never quite like this.
Stretching over two consecutive weekends, the Member Preview days seemed to me an important test of the Frick Madison experiment; those people had some stake in the place—however small—and would likely share my strong feelings. Well, one remark I overheard seemed as useful (and telling) a summarizing thought as any: “Are you as impressed as I am?”
Frick Madison opens to the public on March 18. See here for tickets and other visiting information.
