The Frick Returns, Richer Than Ever

The Frick Collection, connected East Seventieth Street, is, by truthful galore miles, the finest tiny metropolis museum—less self-consciously eccentric than London’s Sir John Soane museum, broader successful scope and much distinguished than Paris’s Jacquemart-André—that its instrumentality aft a fewer years distant for renovation is simply a uncommon blessing successful a clip abbreviated connected them. The postulation ne'er had immoderate acceptable program, beyond lodging Old Master pictures bought by the industrialist Henry Clay Frick with the nudging of the era’s shrewdest tag team: the creation historiographer Bernard Berenson and the trader Joseph Duveen. But, walking done the spot up of its authoritative opening, connected April 17th, 1 is reminded—both by one’s eyes and by the caller director, Axel Rüger—that the postulation does crook toward a point. With scarcely immoderate nudes oregon still-lifes, it turns connected businessmen, bureaucrats, and bishops: affluent men dressed for work.

Holbein’s Thomas Cromwell looks similar a fastidiously evil Cabinet curate who would ne'er accidentally adhd a writer to his substance chain; his Sir Thomas More looks similar Laurence Olivier made up to play Sir Thomas More. Even St. Francis, caught successful ecstasy by Bellini, has his comfy office-hermitage down him, arsenic though helium has stepped distant from his table conscionable agelong capable to person the stigmata. Frick’s radical are radical similar Frick: men of powerfulness and influence. Hercules, the eventual antheral of power, is, if anything, overdressed successful Veronese’s “Choice Between Virtue and Vice”—a callow youth, with an uncanny resemblance to Aaron Paul successful “Breaking Bad,” successful a tailored silk suit. (He seems, similar astir of us, to beryllium struggling manfully toward Virtue, though Vice intelligibly has him successful her grip.)

The essentials of the Frick’s renovation impact the large things beloved to institutions and their architects: a near-doubling of space, an expansive shop, and a Danny Meyer café. Key to each this is simply a remarkably unostentatious caller summation by Annabelle Selldorf, successful collaboration with the steadfast Beyer Blinder Belle. Its architectural showpiece is simply a grand, hyper-marbled, somewhat anachronistic Deco-style staircase. (A caller auditorium replaces the cozy but acoustically flawed enclosure garden.)

For the picture-seeking visitor, however, the astir affecting changes are quieter. The skylights successful the large West Gallery—the 1 with Rembrandt’s “The Polish Rider” and his self-portrait, not to notation the 2 Turners of 2 harbors—have been refurbished and cleaned, and though the effect is subtle, it’s real: the airy is some brighter and much diffuse, perfect for seeing pictures. More important inactive is the mode the caller plan makes the Frick look similar a location again. When the Gilded Age designer Thomas Hastings enactment up the mansion, successful 1914, it was conceived arsenic a residence for the household arsenic good arsenic for the collection. (Frick had an arsenic expansive mansion successful Pittsburgh, wherever helium had made his luck successful steel.) Then, conscionable 5 years later, Frick died, followed by his wife, Adelaide, a twelve years aft that, and the designer John Russell Pope oversaw the conversion of the operation into a depository and library. In this design, which opened successful 1935, the expansive rooms downstairs were what mattered. Now, for the archetypal time, the 2nd floor, wherever the Frick household really lived, is unfastened to the public, redesigned to bespeak the home ambiance and show immoderate of the archetypal hangings erstwhile successful spot there.