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The Frick Collection's New Home Away from Home

Photo credit: Michael Bodycomb
Photo credit: Michael Bodycomb

From Town & Country

When I was a girl, I loved visiting the Frick Collection. Let Eloise roam around the Plaza Hotel—in my Sunday best, I preferred looking at the beautiful paintings in the limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue where an actual family had once lived. Much later I learned more about Vermeer, Rembrandt, Ingres, Bellini, El Greco, and the other Old Masters who were displayed on the damask walls and in wood-paneled rooms that the industrialist Henry Clay Frick had inhabited. To this day I’m a regular visitor who relishes time-­traveling back to the Gilded Age.

But for the next two years the Frick won’t be where we’ve always known it. While the museum is being upgraded by architect Annabelle Selldorf, in a $160 million renovation and expansion, its treasures will be a few blocks away, in the Frick Madison, the building Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer designed for the Whitney Museum of American Art in the mid-1960s (and which most recently housed a satellite location for the Met). For Ian Wardropper, the Frick’s director, the move has been an opportunity, he says, “to rethink and reframe the collection.”

Photo credit: Tiago Molinos
Photo credit: Tiago Molinos

That means arranging paintings, for the first time, by period and place. The three mesmerizing Vermeers, for example, hang close to Rembrandt’s majestic Polish Rider and his achingly poignant late self-portrait. Ingres the Neoclassicist and Renoir the Impressionist are another interesting pairing. Viewed together, eight paintings by van Dyck affirm his standing as Frick’s favorite artist.

Photo credit: Michael Bodycomb
Photo credit: Michael Bodycomb

Furniture, Renaissance bronzes, Chinese and Japanese porcelain, and Middle Eastern carpets are temporarily in their own separate spaces. Asked what will be the greatest surprise about the new displays, Wardropper replies that it will “remind people that the Frick is not just a painting collection.” Many visitors don’t realize that 80 percent of the museum’s holdings comprises sculpture and decorative arts. Previously those objets were scattered throughout the Beaux-Arts mansion designed by Carrère and Hastings in 1914.

Wardropper is delighted that visitors to the Frick Madison will become better acquainted with “one of the greatest tables of the 18th century.” He also mentions a commode that once belonged to Marie Antoinette.

When the elevator doors open in the temporary location, the sculpture that visitors face will announce what’s on that floor. A bronze angel from 1475 leads to Flemish and Dutch displays; Renaissance busts by Francesco Laurana and Andrea del Verrocchio introduce works from Italy; and three marble portraits by Jean-Antoine Houdon are the key to French art. (On the ground level, the future of Flora Bar, chef Ignacio Mattos’s beloved eatery, has yet to be determined.)

Photo credit: Courtesy Selldorf Architects
Photo credit: Courtesy Selldorf Architects

When everything returns to Fifth Avenue in two years, old standbys will, for the most part, return to their former places. Not everything will be the same, though. Visitors will ascend the grand staircase to the family bedrooms that until recently served as offices, and they’ll be able to peruse decorative art and paintings that had been in storage. Also, a temporary exhibition space means nothing will ever again be removed for special shows.

Completing the picture will be little girls and boys being introduced to masterpieces in a mansion where a family once lived—and where generations of art lovers have found a home ever since.

This story appears in the February 2021 issue of Town & Country.
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