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.
The renovated mansion reminds us that it was originally built to house a family as well as a collection.Photograph by Nicholas Venezia / Courtesy the Frick Collection
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.
