The Much-Loved Frick, Back and Better

The redo is total, graceful, and chic . . . It can be done! 

M anhattan’s Frick Collection, which I would call the jewel in New York’s culture crown, opens its renovated Fifth Avenue manse to the public this week. The redo is less a beacon light of pizzazz — it’s the Frick, not Madame Tussaud’s — than a heartwarming embrace of elegance, of restraint, and of considered purpose. I’m not surprised. The $220 million project — a deep-dive renovation and surgical addition — has been in the works for years and parsed by suspicious, mossbacked neighbors, nearly all but the live-in servants very rich, and visitors who will say without a prod that they love the place.

This week, I’ll look at how the Frick has physically changed. The touch looks light, but it’s profound. I’ll write about the rearrangement of the treasure trove collection. Next week, I’ll consider how the Frick has evolved over its 90 years as a museum, the new art on view, some of my old favorites, and whatever else titillates.

For those who don’t know the Frick, the museum is in the 1915 mansion of Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919), the steel mogul and financier whose fortune started when he used a beehive oven to cook coal until it was coke and ready for steel production. He later chaired U.S. Steel, became a whiskey czar, and crushed the Homestead Strike. He connived to build a dam on the cheap to service his private fishing club near rural Johnstown in Pennsylvania. Its collapse infamously flooded the town and killed more than 2,000 people. By 1905, he’d moved on up from Pittsburgh to Manhattan. In the early Teens, he built a luxurious home designed by Carrère and Hastings, the Beaux Arts masters.

Frick also was among America’s — and the world’s — towering collectors of Old Master art. At his wish, his house was opened as a museum in 1935. From its velvet-clad walls — amid exquisite woodwork, French furniture and tapestries fit for kings and once owned by kings, Limoges porcelain, faience, and Renaissance bronzes — hang pictures to live and to die for. Velázquez’s Portrait of Philip IV in Fraga, Bellini’s Saint Francis in the Desert, Fragonard’s Four Seasons, not one, not two, but three Vermeers, and so much else reside in serene, even easygoing splendor.

There are next to no labels. Artist and title are normally on little medallion plaques on period frames. Art’s arranged by what looks good together and not by date, style, or country. Visitors commune more with art and atmosphere and less with art history, though its scholarly program and impressive art reference library make the Frick a very serious place. It was once a home and still is a house museum. It’s not small, and, yes, it’s a mansion, but it still feels like a home.

The Frick wasn’t going to do anything radical. There’d be a revolution, hands off signs held with serious intent to thwart. Change isn’t welcomed in the museum’s quietly rich neighborhood. The Frick is a constant, an oasis of Old Master art in a contemplative, luxe setting. That’s a big part of its brand, with the trustees, staff, and visitors in sync. Still, a renovation was overdue, as was more space. Its systems — HVAC, lighting, alarms, sprinklers, and wiring — needed to be replaced first of all, and now are.

The Frick made the most of the chance to address its space crunch. The big changes start with a more commodious Reception Hall. My take on cramped, confusing entrances is “Suck it up.” If a museum has an elegant entrance, great, but, if not, no one will die. People ought to come for the art. The Frick’s entrance, though, was unusually cramped and confusing. Now, it’s one big space for ticketing, meeting people, the elevators, and a new, cantilevered, marble staircase leading upstairs to new galleries and downstairs to the coat check. The Frick now has a proper shop and a café. It also has ADA top-to-bottom accessibility, replacing a hodgepodge system.

Staircase? Upstairs? You aren’t hallucinating. For those who’ve been to the Frick once or often, an opulent main staircase, barricaded by a tasseled rope, organ pipes on the landing, led to what had to be the most elegant of undisclosed locations. What was upstairs? Even when I was a curator and museum director with lots of cronies at the Frick, I got upstairs only three or four times. Upstairs were once the Frick family bedrooms, sitting rooms, and a breakfast room turned into offices mostly. But, let’s face it, Frick, Mrs. Frick, and the kids slept, sat, and ate their Wheaties in comfort up there. “Upstairs” was always seen as future gallery space, but it never happened, until now.

Visitors can now access the new galleries by the main staircase — I felt like a royal while I climbed them — or by the new, cantilevered staircase in the Reception Hall or the commodious, new elevators. The additions take us to a proper museum shop, replacing the old shop, which was a niche, a new café, and, steps away, to the new galleries. The main staircase takes us directly to art-studded spaces, greeted by Whistler’s Symphony in Grey and Green: Ocean. It’s serene and minimalist, as we’d expect, but unusually big as Whistler views go — an impressive welcome.

The new galleries are mostly small — these were family spaces — and arranged with art that thrives in a warm and cozy ambiance. There are what I call specialist galleries. One is for clocks and watches, one’s for Renaissance medals, and another is for the Frick’s newly acquired and superb French faience. They’re refined and lovely and, in each space, you could teach a class in the art history of a single medium. Then there are galleries with one or two chartbusters. Renoir’s La Promenade, from around 1875, is peak Impressionism and so splashy it holds a hallway gallery. It’s also a family scene.

Having a new space means that things have moved here and there, and for good reason. Boucher’s The Arts and Sciences — eight very charming, vertical panels of children playing such roles as poet, musician, chemist, and astronomer — were displayed with other Rococo things near the museum’s entrance for years, but, in olden days, they were in Mrs. Frick’s sitting room by her bedroom. They’re back upstairs now, along with a case of gorgeous, silken Sèvres porcelain. In the new galleries, small things get more eye contact. I’d never noticed Bruegel the Elder’s Three Soldiers, a little grisaille picture of a drummer, a standard-bearer, and a fifer, each fancily dressed and egging their colleagues to fight. It’s silly, but it’s also spooky since blood is about to be shed.

Frick’s bedroom is big on pretty women. The portrait of the future Lady Hamilton — George Romney’s Emma Hart as “Nature” — is surrounded with carved garlands, fruit, and flowers on a walnut wall.

The old, improvised, tiny, congested, awful basement space for temporary exhibitions is no more. The Frick was using it less and less, doing temporary loan shows in first-floor, permanent-collection spaces where the art, usually its grand full-length English portraits, went in storage. Gone. Now, the old Frick music room on the first floor, also its auditorium, is remade into temporary exhibition space.

The Frick picked Selldorf Architects, led by Annabelle Selldorf. Her firm’s calling card is restrained elegance and an eye that’s precise and entrepreneurial. It was a perfect match. The Frick had proposed an expansion and renovation in 2014 that flopped for being too intrusive on the museum and the neighborhood. The trustees, the staff, and Ian Wardropper, the director, returned chastened to the drawing board, hiring Selldorf. It was a perfect match. Exactingly — Selldorf is German by birth and upbringing — they repurposed 60,000 square feet of space. Some of it, like a sparkling, new auditorium under the museum, had to come through divine intervention. Sacrifices to the engineering gods? No. Selldorf and her team are simply that good. The firm also designed the renovation of the Clark Art Institute’s original, 1950s-era museum building. It’s the only part of the Clark’s massive expansion project I like.

At big expense, and inspired by good institutional citizenship, the Frick didn’t put its collection in storage for the years it was closed. Rather, it displayed them in the Marcel Breuer–designed, Brutalist pile that used to be the Whitney Museum and then, for a few years after the Whitney moved, the Met’s contemporary space. I was less inclined than many to marvel at the Frick’s Old Masters in so astringent a setting. Breuer’s galleries are fluid and accommodating. Almost everything looks good there, and there was no reason Fragonard, El Greco, and Rembrandt wouldn’t.

New Yorkers and tourists valued the Frick’s continued presence. It’s an essential part of the Manhattan experience. My first visit there was in the early 1970s, on my first solo trip to New York. My parents allowed me to drive to the train station in New Haven, go to the city, have lunch, go to the Frick, go to a matinee, and get myself back to ye olde North Haven in one piece. My mother gave me a roll of dimes in case I needed to call home for an emergency evacuation. This was, after all, New York, circa 1973. The Frick was then, for me, a sumptuous palace, European style, that miraculously landed in New York.

It’s no miracle, though. Frick, Andrew Mellon, Henry and Archer Huntington, the Havemeyers, the Wideners, Mrs. Gardner, and J. P. Morgan were very, very rich and thought of themselves as the new aristocrats displacing those of the Old World. Collecting art, especially Old Masters, was part of the new image, but these collectors weren’t buying only for show. Frick’s primary dealer, Joseph Duveen, guided him, but he had his own discerning eye for a mix stately, grand subjects, portraits, and a mix of media for a total, plush look, leavened by lots of Rococo fun and frolic.

Visitors who loved the Frick before the redo will probably love it afterward, in part because the marquee spaces haven’t changed much. The West Gallery, the Frick’s biggest, is still anchored by a full-length El Greco portrait from his Rome years and Goya’s The Forge on one end, Veronese’s The Choice Between Virtue and Vice and Wisdom and Strength on the other, with two massive, early Turners flanking each other in the middle. The Garden Court fountain still bubbles. The Oval Room still features full-length swagger portraits.

Finishes are paramount. These are the details that give the functional parts of a building panache and aesthetic heft, things like doorknobs, decorative moldings, boutique canopies of lighting, textured and colored stone, fabric walls, among other details taking the space from humdrum to resplendent. The bar at the Frick was high, set by Carrère and Hastings and Frick himself, all having access to the best materials and craftsmen. Bulbs hanging from wires won’t do.

In the expanded Reception Hall, blue-streaked Italian marble extends and complements the existing marble. Shallow ceiling coffers frame custom-made Murano-glass pendant lanterns inspired by original Garden Court lanterns. They’re made by Seguso, a family business in its 23rd generation. Indiana limestone from the quarry used for the original house covers walls and floors in newly built spaces. New green silk velvet wall covering came from Lyon in France. The walls shimmer as light moves. There’s plenty of restoration work, too. Repairing old, carved woodwork demanded some scavenging. Discarded card catalogues from Frick’s library did the trick. Dozens of old chandeliers, sconces, and hanging, armless fixtures were cleaned and rewired.

The reborn Frick is a triumph. It’s timeless beauty, polished and with more room to love. It opens to the public on April 17.