The Frick and Modernism, Perfect Together

Good architecture, good art, good curators … That’s magic.

D oes great art have an aura? I’m a frosty Yankee, but I’m an art historian, too, and not beyond believing in magic. I’ve yet to see a painting glow, aside from having inspired lighting, but many of the works on the walls at the new Frick on Madison Avenue do more than that. They command my attention. The portraits especially are alive and insistent in a way I never experienced them at the mansion on 70th Street. Now set against gray walls, with bluestone floors, sometimes parquet, at their feet, and suspended, concrete grid ceilings above them, and all clutter annihilated, the Frick’s art, almost all Old Masters, seem bigger and bolder.

Last year, the Frick closed for its $160 million overhaul. Next week, it reopens temporarily, probably for two years, in the old Whitney building, a ziggurat built in 1966 that’s austere inside and out. “How will everything look?” I thought. I assume others asked this as well, since the move from Frick’s Beaux-Arts palace to Marcel Breuer’s Bauhaus pile is a big news story and aesthetic earthquake.

The place looks great, and I’m not surprised. There’s comfort in these times — truculent, catarrhal, and petty as they are — to know that the Frick will always do things to high standard. It rises above the mountains of mediocrity that surround those few of us with taste and a yen for rigor. Its brand is elegance and seriousness but of the Old World kind. What the curators have done at the Breuer building is elegant and serious, but it’s still a very, very different look.

I think it’s best to put aside the term “Brutalist” in thinking about the Breuer building. It doesn’t serve it well. Breuer (1902–1981), after all, wasn’t after the audacity of raw concrete or monochrome minimalism. It’s a stone temple to art with a handsome granite façade that has lots of nice pink in it, burnished bronze finishes, and acres of rusticated bluestone floors. Ceilings, especially on the top floor, are high. It’s a robust building but still suave and inviting.

It says “not I” to Manhattan’s glass and steel skyscrapers, Madison Avenue’s boutique culture, and the faux-French apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue. “I’m the real thing,” a purpose-built museum building aware of its purpose: to make the art on display look good. So, as much as I admire the Frick’s curators and the institution’s exquisite, faultless taste, I know also it’s a safe bet that most art is going to look good in Breuer’s building. The galleries accommodate all types of storyline, including the new Frick’s, where the art is now arranged by country. Their proportions are various. They’re not strictly symmetrical but close enough to feel thoroughly old-school.

I spent the afternoon in the building at the press preview, but the speeches had already occurred during the virtual version I skipped. I’ll take a detour here that might sound bitchy, but I, for one, am sick of reading exhibition reviews written by critics who haven’t seen the thing in the flesh. I taught for 20 years and read thousands of term papers, so I think I can spot an experience that’s entirely vicarious.

Yes, we live in the age of COVID and travel can discommode the fraidy-cat class, but we critics all have press badges and can go anywhere. I’ve traveled to dozens of places in the last year, and once or twice I did put breathing on hold for what seemed like hours, but good critics don’t write about something they haven’t seen. It’s bad form and unfair to readers.

Detour accomplished. The lobby looks good, but it’s a lobby, and I was there to see Rembrandts, Turners, Whistlers, and frothy, frisky putti and cavorting French maidens. All I’ll say is I hope it stays uncluttered since it’s an attractive, sleek space.

The second floor displays Dutch, Flemish, and Netherlandish art as well as Holbein’s double Thomases — More and Cromwell. Forget about Ali and Frazier in ’74. This is the Tudor Tussle, and the two face each other in a niche that’s just the right size to suggest a duel of penetrating looks forecasting a bowling match of rolled heads.

Cromwell helped send More to his death. Soon enough, the axe came for Cromwell. Such were the hazards of getting up and going to work each morning in the world of Henry VIII. Seeing these two above dark parquet floors, each flanked by an empty wall, I was bewitched.

There were already two mood makers, though, just steps from the elevator. Jean Barbet’s Angel, from 1475, four feet tall and bronze, is alone, erect, and frosty, and about as angelic as Mrs. Danvers welcoming Rebecca to Manderley. The first painting I saw was the small, ghostly, arresting grisaille, Three Soldiers, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I’d never noticed it before in my hundreds of visits to the Frick. Immediately, in the next space, are the Holbeins.

The arrangement of art is Spartan throughout. Mostly, it’s one painting per wall. Two Hals portraits in the next space were a respite. They might not be laughing, but they look hearty and happy, and we can assume the burgomaster in one didn’t send the old lady in the other to the chopping block. Then the Rembrandt Self-Portrait, from 1658, the Portrait of Nicolaes Ruts, from 1631, and The Polish Rider, from around 1655, are together in their own niche.

That’s a jaw-dropping trio. At the old Frick, the art wasn’t arranged by country but by Henry Clay Frick, with tweaks here and there. It was never hodgepodge. Things just weren’t hung via art history. Now that it’s by country, “Dutch School” here, we see Rembrandt’s evolution from young to old painter.

Frick bought lots of portraits, so we can see the same changes in style in van Dyke and Gainsborough over time but also the tactics of, say, Gainsborough and Reynolds. In the two late Rembrandts, it’s not only the subjects that stop us in our tracks. Every sweeping, thick brushstroke coaxes from brown every nuance a color can have.

I used “commanding” earlier. “Demanding” suits, too. The art is fantastic on every level, but (and I’m investing a mute object with agency and personality) the paintings, most of them at least, seem glad to be rid of the furniture, carpets, and bric-a-brac they’ve lived with for a hundred years. Like silent-movie stars in closeup, they revel in being seen. The gray wall color promotes this, as do the expert lighting and perfect spacing. Yes, less is more under most circumstances, but these portraits especially seem at home in the spotlight.

The subjects of the Rembrandt, Hals, van Dyke, and Holbein portraits likely had charisma, or the glamour that comes with being admired. They’re prosperous, except for the bankrupt Rembrandt, powerful, or, in the case of van Dyck’s Sir John Suckling, a celebrity wit and gallant. Breuer’s galleries are perfect stages for them.

Less so for the three Vermeers. The Dutch and Flemish portraits crave the spotlight, but these small scenes of everyday life seem to cry for comfy clutter. Vermeer painted them to be displayed in a domestic interior, so they’re small. Intimacy is among their subjects. It’s not as odd as it first seems, but I think of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town when I see Vermeer’s small, more casual interiors. There, the actors have a story to tell, but so do objects, objects as witnesses, as a locus for pleasure, memory, and wealth, or as everyday things we ignore but shouldn’t.

Vermeer’s objects have the mysterious glow of his people, and that moves the viewer, or at least moves me, to allow a voice to the mundane that surrounds me. Vermeer sharpens the eye to look for subtle or even hidden beauty in the props and scenery that surround us. The viewer’s ambiance informs what we see in Vermeer, and vice versa, so the Breuer space seems too spartan, even intimidating. The three paintings seem shrunken or in captivity. They’re by Vermeer, and there’s three of them, so they ought to have their own space, but it doesn’t work. I would have treated them like the Bruegel, putting them in a long gallery facing other things so at least they have company other than themselves.

The third floor is Italian and Spanish painting and porcelain, bronzes, marble sculpture, and two northern Indian carpets. The Spanish paintings have never been seen together. Here, the art is eclectic rather than a linear art-history lesson. The Portrait of Vincenzo Anastagi, from 1575, by El Greco is only retrospectively Spanish. El Greco did it in Rome before he went to Toledo. It’s still one of the great Italian Mannerist portraits. Velazquez’s Portrait of Philip IV, from 1644, has to be one of the Frick’s half dozen heaviest hitters. It’s in splendid isolation, with its own wall.

The Frick’s Spanish things belong near Titian and Veronese, and by this point the Frick’s curators have given visitors a rhythm of spacious sequences from one dazzling painting to another. Much as the second floor started with Barbet’s Angel, from 1475, lofty and stern, the third floor is introduced by a trio of Italian portrait busts, also from the 1470s, one by Verrocchio and two by Francesco Laurana. The floor has a grand gallery ruled by Veronese’s big allegories but made grand by a big Sangallo sculpture of St. John Baptizing, from the 1530s.

This is a nice touch for two reasons, establishing a clever spatial progression that’s part curatorial smarts and part the genius of Breuer. The second floor has a grand gallery, filled with van Dyke portraits, with no sculpture, and off to the left. It’s impressive but not of dénouement caliber. By that time, my knees were already wobbling after seeing the Rembrandts. On the third floor, the grand gallery is in the middle and feels like a traditional piano nobile — principal floor — but, with a little imagination, the bluestone turns into pavement and the viewer travels to an old Italian courtyard with sculpture in the middle.

If that’s not enough drama, then there’s the Frick’s St. Francis in the Desert, by Bellini. It’s got its own small gallery lit by Breuer’s big trapezoid windows. It’s a chapel-like setting, and you have to be demonic not to feel at least a twinge of old-time religion. The Bellini could not have gone anywhere else because it found its perfect place.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve written about art in religious spaces, most recently the Rothko Chapel, and I’ll add the Bellini, since the Frick has placed it as a new religious space. Breuer’s building and Rothko’s paintings are both mid-1960s, and they were the same age, though, obviously, very different artists. Both were after beauty through essentials, not frills or abundance, and so was St. Francis.

I also wrote a few times last year about Classical architecture and its relevance today. Breuer is very modern, but he’s a Classicizing architect using not columns and pediments for stone and a rational sequence of spaces and proportions. He has the Doric order in his blood, which is one reason the Frick’s Italian things look so good there but also one among a thousand reasons that so many Whitney biennials looked so bad. The architecture can do only so much before throwing its hands up and saying “yuck.”

I’ll never criticize the Frick — it’s distinguished and an icon of perfect taste — and this is merely a quibble, or an inquisitive peep. I’m not crazy about the porcelain room. Two walls are perfect. These show eight or nine objects above a French commode. Each object keeps its sense of self. Two other walls have about 25 objects each. I know the goal is to reproduce the old museum-style porcelain room, where porcelain is displayed in abundance as an aesthetic whole, but it’s not easy to see each object for the gem it is.

And another peep. I don’t particularly fancy the room of bronze sculpture but do like it more than the porcelain. Arranging bronzes in small pediments is a good new idea. It underscores the power of small things to evoke big ideas. As much as I like seeing great paintings flaunting a new, fierce freedom from itsy-bitsy bronzes, let’s not annihilate the old Frick altogether. Mixing some bronzes with the Italian paintings might have been wise.

The fourth floor, with the highest ceilings, is for grand British portraiture and Fragonard’s Progress of Love. It’s introduced, also in a nice touch, by a gallery facing the elevators that’s filled with French sculpture and the Clodion clock from 1788 and, immediately next to them, a niche for the little French rococo paintings and a niche for French furniture. This is a heartening salute to the old Frick. The paintings by Boucher, Greuze, Watteau, and Chardin are succulent little springs from which libido flows. They don’t mind the austerity of the Breuer spaces. They’ll look sexy on the surface of the moon.

These British grand portraits and the big Fragonard cycle need space. British aristocrats from the age of the Georges are dressed for success, rowdy and rambunctious. The ruling class might have turned enervated by the time Sargent paints them, but Romney, Reynolds, and Gainsborough painted them in their prime. They demand lebensraum. The Fragonards are all about gamboling among flora and fauna, and that lubricity needs space, too. The vistas providing peaks of art in the distance are lovely. Sometimes we find romance at a glance, but it’s far enough to make for a chase. Love thrives on impediment and pursuit.

I’m happy to see all the Frick’s familiar treasures, and after the last year everyone else probably is, too. The Frick board might have been open to launching a money-making treasures tour, but Frick’s will prohibits the art he bought from traveling. I don’t think even the most artful dodger among lawyers could have argued otherwise, even with the building closed for a renovation. In any event, the Frick’s director wanted to keep as much of the art on view in the city. But where to show it?

When the Whitney moved in 2015, the Met took an eight-year lease on the Breuer building, unwisely so, for modern and contemporary art exhibitions. It wasn’t a disaster – the Marsden Hartley show I saw there is still, to me, one of the best I’ve ever seen — but multiple museum campuses are a marketing nuisance. The Met’s money woes — a chronic and, in part, self-made drama — led it before long to think twice. I’m not saying it unloaded a carbuncle on the Frick, but the timing was right. The Met’s free of the Breuer building, sort of, since the Frick is paying only the overhead and will return it to the Whitney in 2023.

I’ve suggested to anyone at the Frick who’ll even pretend to listen to me that keeping a lid on spending in this phase of its project is essential. It’s doing a $160 million fundraising drive to pay for construction alone. That’s a lot of money even in Manhattan. The Frick doesn’t want to scrimp on finishes later because it spent early on what I’d call “consumables,” such as a temporary showplace. The Frick has never raised that much money. I hope it got a good deal from the Met. The Met already spent millions making the Breuer building presentable.

It was looking ratty in the Whitney’s last years there.

I asked about the status of the construction. The Frick has gotten all its permits, and groundbreaking is soon. Its renovation and expansion are tasteful and balanced. The mansion needs a renovation, and that can’t be deferred anymore. The project makes the Frick’s library, the best art library in America, more user-friendly. I’m a Victorian and believe places like the Frick need to be deeply involved in the education of children so they don’t become soccer hooligans or, worse, murderers, bank robbers, or Bolsheviks. Quaint, I know, but that’s what I believe. The renovated building will make this more practical. I think, for many, the high point of the project will be the opening of the Frick’s second floor to visitors. The rooms upstairs might have been bedrooms for the Fricks, but they’re grand, with finishes more elegant and frillier than the first floor’s.

The Frick’s collection continues to grow. It buys art and gets amazing gifts. Two years ago, for instance, it got the country’s best collection of Italian and French faience. Discerning collectors know that a gift of art to the Frick will be put on view and not stuffed in a vault or, in an abomination of all times, sold to pay the electric bill, which is what the Met wants to do.