The Fabulous Frick Redo, a Fundraising and Architectural Success

After its 2014 plan to expand was scuttled, its leadership rethought and made something better.

L ast week I visited the elegantly restored and expanded Frick Collection on Fifth Avenue and E. 70th Street. While work was being done on the Beaux-Arts mansion, most of its paintings and sculptures were on view a bit north at the old Whitney, an austere, looming Brutalist pile, with white-walled galleries. The Frick’s Old Masters looked fine, though very different, and everyone probably missed the rarefied ambiance when Rembrandt, Turner, and Fragonard mixed with the Frick’s tassels, walnut walls, and fat sofas.

Years ago, I told the director, Ian Wardropper, that $220 million was a boatload of money to raise, even in Manhattan, given the competition from big museums such as MoMA and the Met and many hundreds of small arts nonprofits. It actually rose to over $320 million, since living at the old Whitney for three years was pricy. You’d think a Beaux-Arts palace with so many finishes would be expensive, but so is the Whitney’s inverted Babylonian ziggurat. The Frick had never done fundraising of that magnitude.

Named after a Gilded Age gazillionaire, the Frick, it would be assumed, was already loaded. The reality, I should add, is that the museum hadn’t been flush for years. For years, its finances were wobbly. Until recently, the board was heavy on Frick family members. Infrastructure improvements for the museum and the library were intermittent and improvised, in part because fundraising didn’t seem possible. As rich as Henry Clay Frick was when he died, and he left the new museum a $15 million endowment, the board spent lots of money.

After Frick’s widow died, the house was expanded by the architect John Russell Pope to accommodate the museum. Their daughter chaired the board’s acquisitions committee, and while she was thought to be the richest unmarried woman in America, she spent and spent. During her reign, the Frick bought Duccio’s The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain, from around 1310, Ingres’s famous Comtesse d’Haussonville, with that ultimate in come-hither looks, a Constable six-footer, and portraits by Rembrandt, Goya, and Reynolds. At her push, the Frick also vastly expanded its art library, still one of the world’s greatest.

After a few false starts on an expansion, the last, in 2014, a crash-and-burn, the Frick hired Selldorf Architects and developed a plan that makes everyone happy. The 2014 plan was a surprise in that it failed totally among the Frick’s neighbors. It involved a six-story expansion and the demolition of its 70th Street garden. I didn’t care much about the garden — it’s from the 1970s — and for all the upsetment among the neighbors, the Frick is a public museum. The neighbors, all, I assume, rich, didn’t want school buses, although Jeffrey Epstein lived across the street from the Frick and might not have minded fresh recruits.

Epstein or no, the plan died. In retrospect, everyone probably agrees that the Selldorf program is better than the flop in 2014. It’s less intrusive but finds the new space that the place needs. The Frick has its lovely second-floor galleries, a new auditorium, new temporary-exhibition space, a new café, a new shop, a better conservation lab, and, as a kicker, the Frick library and museum are now actually connected. In ye olden days, to get from one to the other, visitors had to go back outside and walk a block.

I was wrong, at least in suggesting that its fundraising goal might be too ambitious. That I’m unprophetic happens at least once a millennium. The Frick raised the money and more. I sometimes forget how rich the astonishingly rich are in New York, but with friends like Ronald Lauder and Stephen Schwarzman, heavy lifts suddenly lighten. Over many years, the museum was building a donor base among lovers of quality, a quietly posh setting, and the sense, unlike what’s to be had at the Met or MoMA, that a donor and even a visitor can have a stake in the Frick’s future. It has built a vibrant young-donor group, which will ensure a good future. New York’s big arts organizations, whether the Met or the opera or MoMA, tend to focus largely if not exclusively on megadonors. The Frick treats its donors well and graciously, regardless of the number of zeros in the checks they send. That’s classy.

I’ve known all the Frick’s directors and most of its curators since the 1980s and liked them all. I have a soft spot, though, for Wardropper, whom I met when he was a sculpture curator at the Met. He succeeded Anne Poulet, whom I also like and admire and who built the will to renovate and expand and the museum’s initial capacity. Wardropper, though, was the critical force in salvaging the place after the debacle in 2014, putting the Frick back on track with a new plan, showing a soft touch in his fundraising style, and keeping the Frick in the public eye by moving most of the collection to the old Whitney. That was a very brave thing to do. Wardropper and the board set themselves up for $100 million more in fundraising but were committed to keeping the art accessible.

I’m curious to see how the Frick’s programming develops now that it has new, ample temporary-exhibition space. The museum does lots of small exhibitions, sometimes as few as two or three works of art, which I don’t really consider an exhibition but more like an event. Sometimes these shows are a handful of treasure paintings from out-of-the-way places, such as the Dulwich Picture Gallery near London or the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif. Sometimes, too, the Frick will do a proper, full-throated show, as with its superb Luigi Valadier exhibition and its Moroni survey show, both a few years ago.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to believe that less is more. The Frick organizes these tiny shows, which are often gems, for financial reasons. It doesn’t have the money for a Met-style blockbuster. Its shows are intimate, which keeps with its brand, and the museum throws unusually good opening parties. The catalogues are usually good.

If this model works for the museum and pleases its regular visitors, it should keep doing them. There’s no need to fiddle with success.

For the Frick’s reopening, it’s showing a small selection of its drawings collection — a dozen objects — and plans to exhibit its own Vermeer, Mistress and Maid, with a Vermeer from the Rijksmuseum and another from the National Gallery of Ireland. The show — or event — is called Vermeer’s Love Letters and opens this summer. Now, with its new exhibition space, I wonder whether the Frick will flirt with the temporary-loan-show treadmill. That would change the place in many ways, among them fundraising and curatorial headaches.

A final note on the Frick’s new space. It’s now got a proper education center for classroom instruction. For years, the Frick wouldn’t allow children, I suppose because the art’s too esoteric and, let’s face it, kids make noise. It still won’t allow children younger than ten. The museum has had a lively education program for years but now has classrooms. The education center is for older students, too. Art can now be brought from storage for in-depth study.

With the reopening, the Frick has published The Frick Collects, a history of the collection through the lens of American taste in art, at least among collectors operating in the cultural or financial stratospheres. Wardropper, who’s retired now, wrote it, with Julian Fellowes contributing the foreword. It’s a good read and beautifully illustrated. Frick made his fortune in the steel industry in southwestern Pennsylvania and started collecting art there in the 1880s. Clayton, his home in Pittsburgh, is a house museum today exhibiting Frick’s early acquisitions, among them some very good Barbizon paintings and pastels.

When Frick and his family moved to New York in 1905, he started afresh with Old Masters. Even today, 90 years after the Frick Collection opened, it’s not big, with around 1,600 objects, many of which came to the museum after Frick died in 1919.

The Frick Collects has chapters on Frick as a Pittsburgh collector, his experience with decorators including Elsie de Wolfe, his start with antique furniture, and his massive purchase of J. P. Morgan’s sculpture after his death. Frick’s jump into the Old Masters painting market was short, accelerating from, say, 1913 to his death in 1919.

“The Ones That Got Away” chapter tells us that, even with Frick’s money, you can’t always get what you want. Frick missed on van Dyck’s 1623 portraiture of Marchesa Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo, nabbed by Peter Widener and now in the National Gallery in Washington. Frick had the chance to buy it for a princely $490,000 but declined. He was feeling poor! A few years later, Frick must have felt heartbroken after missing the chance to buy two of Titian’s “poésie” paintings. Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, among six paintings done for Spain’s Philip II, were offered to him by the family of the duke of Sutherland. The asking price for the two — plus two other lesser Titians — was £400,000, about £59 million in today’s money, or $67 million. Frick offered £160,000, the equivalent of about $780,00 at the time. The family declined, and the two “poésie” Titians divide their time between the National Gallery in London and the National Gallery of Scotland.

Art collecting is a roller coaster, and for his few misses, Frick had hundreds of hits. I visited the day the Frick was open to its Friends cohort. I can tell when a crowd’s happy in a museum, and these people were happy. Never underestimate how beloved the place is. And today’s opening day!