The Sleeve Should Be Illegal and Other Reflections on Art at the Frick edited by Michaelyn Mitchell, with a foreword by Adam Gopnik Holbein’s Sir Thomas More by Hilary Mantel and Xavier F. Salomon and four other books in the Frick Diptych Series
The Sleeve Should Be Illegal and Other Reflections on Art at the Frick edited by Michaelyn Mitchell, with a foreword by Adam Gopnik.
The Frick Collection/DelMonico/
DAP New York, 168 pp., $29.95
Holbein’s Sir Thomas More by Hilary Mantel and
Xavier F. Salomon.
The Frick Collection/D Giles, 72 pp., $17.95
Constable’s White Horse by William Kentridge and Aimee Ng. The Frick Collection/D Giles,
72 pp., $24.95
Rembrandt’s Polish Rider by Maira Kalman and
Xavier F. Salomon.
The Frick Collection/D Giles, 84 pp., $19.95
Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid by James Ivory and Margaret Iacono. The Frick Collection/D Giles,
64 pp., $19.95
Gouthière’s Candelabras by Edmund de Waal and Charlotte Vignon.
The Frick Collection/D Giles, 64 pp., $19.95
In his diary for May 6, 1997, the English essayist and playwright Alan Bennett—a trustee of the National Gallery, London, and an enthusiast of old master paintings—left an unexpectedly dyspeptic account of a visit to the Frick Collection in New York (his first in over thirty-four years). In search of somewhere to sit, he noted:
So I end up in the picture gallery, where there are a couple of
benches—and a couple of Rembrandts, too, and a brace of Turners, a Velázquez and a Vermeer, the arrangement, roughly, portraitlandscape-portrait-landscape all round this dark, glass-ceilinged room. None of the paintings is shown to advantage, most looking dull and hung so close to each other as to make them difficult to take in on their own. Thus there’s a painting of Philip IV by Velázquez hung next to Vermeer’s Lady with Her Maid and a self-portrait of Rembrandt in old age; none is lit, they don’t complement one another, and together look like a trio of mud-coloured pictures.
Bennett was immune to the charms of an installation intended to evoke— and, in certain cases, replicate—the founder’s arrangement of paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts in his Gilded Age mansion. With London’s Wallace Collection in mind, perhaps— where the collection bequeathed by Sir Richard Wallace’s widow must still be “kept together unmixed with other objects of art”—Bennett assumed that the arrangements in the Frick were unchanging, “by the terms of its endowment.”
In fact, the museum is an agglomeration of spaces (and, to a degree, of collections) that have evolved over time. The house at 1 East 70th Street commissioned by the industrialist Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) from the architectural firm Carrère and Hastings in 1912 was transformed into a museum in 1935 with the addition of John Russell Pope’s Garden Court, Oval Room, Music Room, and East Gallery. The peaceful and expansive inner court, with its long pool and verdant plantings, is a signature space of the museum, but neither Frick nor his wife, Adelaide Childs, ever saw it. (They died in 1919 and 1931, respectively.) In 1977 a small one-story pavilion in seventeenth-century French style designed by John Barrington Bayley was added to the eastern façade, and beside it, Russell Page’s 70th Street Garden.
Most recently, in December 2011 the outdoor garden portico on Fifth Avenue was enclosed and transformed into a naturally lit gallery to house the East Asian and Meissen porcelain given to the museum by the collector Henry H. Arnhold. Since then, Jean-Antoine Houdon’s extraordinary life-size terracotta statue Diana the Huntress, acquired in 1939, has been shown in a commanding position in the Portico Gallery’s rotunda. Yet as Adam Gopnik notes in his foreword to The Sleeve Should Be Illegal and Other Reflections on Art at the Frick—an anthology of sixty-two essays by artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians on their favorite works—despite the patient explanation of the Frick’s curators regarding the various movements within and around the collection, the presumption that the Frick is a museum that does not change remains deeply rooted, and offers reassurance to many of its visitors.
After a protracted, widely covered, and at times contentious campaign to upgrade and extend the Frick’s building and facilities—launched in June 2014 with the announcement of a fairly disastrous expansion plan by the architectural firm Davis Brody Bond that entailed building over Page’s 70th Street Garden—in June 2018 the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission finally approved the Frick’s “revised application” for the expansion of the museum under the direction of
Selldorf Architects. (Beyer Blinder Belle was hired as the executive architect.) The question of how and where to display the highlights of the collection during the projected three years of demolition and rebuilding was ingeniously resolved when the trustees decided to take over the Breuer Building at 945 Madison Avenue, which had been leased by the Whitney Museum of American Art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for eight years beginning in 2015. (In May of that year the Whitney decamped to Renzo Piano’s majestic new building on Gansevoort Street.) The Frick gained access to the building in September 2020, following the Met Breuer’s valedictory exhibition, “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,” scheduled to run from March 4 to July 5, 2020, but which, because of Covid-19, was on view for barely a week, closing—like so much else in the city—on March 12.
While only four blocks from the Frick, Marcel Breuer’s building for the Whitney enshrined the values of an altogether different sector of the art world. Commissioned in July 1963 by the trustees of the Whitney—which since 1954 had been housed at 22 West 54th Street, adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art—to be constructed on a relatively small corner lot in the heart of the (then) gallery scene for modern and contemporary art, it opened in September 1966. The building is an inverted ziggurat with cantilevered floors, whose façade of flame-treated polished granite is punctuated by trapezoidal windows of various sizes—one overlooking Madison Avenue, six overlooking 75th Street—attached “like mysterious ornamental brooches, to the blocky exterior.”1 The Whitney’s interiors were primarily bush-hammered concrete walls, with board-formed concrete wall bases and precast-concrete gridded ceilings. Flooring was predominantly natural-cleft bluestone pavers, with walnut parquet on the second floor, since the museum needed a space for dancing. The galleries on three floors were open plan, unimpeded by columns or pillars, to be partitioned by floor-to-ceiling modular panels. A masterpiece of the new Brutalism by a Bauhaus luminary, deemed fitting to be “the housing for twentieth-century art,” it might seem the least-well-suited temporary home for a collection of (primarily) European masterpieces from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, intended to be seen in interdisciplinary arrangements in a domestic setting.
That this is manifestly not the case— the installation at Frick Madison (as the temporary arrangement is called) is extraordinarily satisfying, elegant, thoughtful, and respectful at every turn—is due in part to the Met’s superb restoration of the interiors of Breuer’s building, including the beautiful stair
tower, with its cast terrazzo and exquisite finishes. Systems were upgraded throughout, obsolete interventions made after 1966 removed, floors and walls cleaned and refurbished—the new walnut parquet was modeled on an original remnant found inside a closet—and a large digital wall added to the redesigned lobby. Of course, the greatest credit goes to the Frick’s curatorial team—including both former and newly appointed curators—led by Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon and curator Aimee Ng, working with Annabelle Selldorf of Selldorf Architects, exhibition designer Stephen Saitas, and lighting designer Anita Jorgensen. Saitas and Jorgensen have worked with the Frick curators on temporary exhibitions and displays for almost two decades and know the collection intimately.
Installed over three floors, showing around two thirds of the 470 works formerly on view at 1 East 70th Street— with nearly all the major paintings and sculptures included, as well as a handful of new acquisitions, some donated as recently as 2020—the collection is laid out in chronological order, by school (and, where possible, by artist) and by media, with sculpture and the decorative arts given their own galleries. No attempt has been made to replicate the display in Frick’s mansion, with its “acres of velvet,” but the curators have kept faith with certain organizing principles that governed the presentation of the collection there. Paintings are not behind glass; sculptures, decorative objects, and porcelains are not in cases (for the most part); there are no stanchions or barriers; and only a handful of the smaller Renaissance bronzes are shown in vitrines. Maintaining such direct and unmediated access to individual works of art—for the first time I was able to see (if not actually decipher) the notes on the score in Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at Her Music— means that children under ten are still not admitted.
More radically, the curators have resisted any desire to provide introductory wall texts or explanatory labels. As in the Frick mansion, the visitor receives A Guide to Works of Art on Exhibition, printed on good paper, which follows the traditional design by the Oliphant Press. Information on all the works is also provided through a smartphone app. However, as before, at Frick Madison no photography in the collection is permitted, and on the day I visited the guards were vigilant in enforcing this.
In a series of carefully calibrated galleries, rooms, and bays, and following a spare, almost minimalist approach, Salomon and Ng have chosen to show the works on a variety of gray walls, with sculptures placed on new, rough-hewn pedestals. These glorious sequences also keep faith with Breuer’s recommendations for the display of art in his new museum. In the Architect’s Report that he prepared for the Whitney trustees in November 1963, he noted that the “essential requirement” for the interior exhibition spaces was that they provide “a simple, uniform and unpretentious background for the paintings and sculpture.” In German-inflected syntax, Breuer noted in his comments for the board presentation:
Simplicity and backgroundcharacter of the gallery spaces with the visitors [sic] attention reserved to the exhibits . . . all walls and panels are light grey, the concrete ceiling a related grey, and the split slate floors another related darker grey.
Indeed, the palette chosen for Frick Madison—Manor House Gray, Pavilion Gray, Kendall Charcoal, and Rockport Gray—would surely have gratified Breuer.
At the beginning of each floor, the viewer is greeted by masterpieces of bronze, marble, and terracotta sculpture. On the second floor, devoted to Northern European painting from Hans Memling to Vermeer, visitors first encounter the Angel, cast in 1475 by Jean Barbet, a Lyonnais cannon maker, and one of the very few surviving monumental bronzes from this period. Hans Holbein’s portraits of Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, painted five years apart, still face each other as they traditionally have, but are now hung alone, unencumbered. Aesthetically, there is no contest. Hilary Mantel may have rehabilitated Henry VIII’s chief minister, but Holbein’s portrait of Cromwell as Master of the Jewel House is at best a poorly preserved original. The quality and condition of Sir Thomas More are simply miraculous. Rooms devoted to Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Van Dyck follow, and in the last all eight of the Frick’s portraits by Van Dyck are assembled in groupings that chart his progress from Genoa via Antwerp to the court of Charles I.
The third floor, devoted to Italy and Spain, is introduced by a trio of Renaissance female portrait busts in marble. The early Italian Renaissance paintings favored by Frick’s daughter, Helen Clay—founder of the Frick Art Reference Library—which include panels by Cimabue and Duccio, and a number of works from Piero della Francesca’s altarpiece for the church of Sant’Agostino in Borgo San Sepolcro, have been liberated from the Enamels Room of the Frick mansion to take possession of their own gallery. Exceptionally, the Frick’s most significant Asian works, two seventeenth-century Indian carpets woven during the reign of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and restored in 2005, are placed in the following room. In the next gallery, riotously colored and fancifully mounted European and Asian porcelain acknowledges the founder’s passion for Qing Dynasty figures and vessels as well as the much more recent additions of works from the Meissen and Du Paquier manufactories.
From here one enters the grandest space on the third floor, a sala devoted primarily to sixteenth-century Italian painting and sculpture, with Veronese’s majestic allegories—The Choice Between Virtue and Vice and Wisdom and Strength—dominating the far wall. In the one overtly theatrical element of the entire installation, Francesco da Sangallo’s bronze statuette St. John Baptizing presides in the center of this room, set high atop a replica of its original base, the marble font designed by Giovanfresco Pagni for the church of Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato. Commissioned in 1534 by the greengrocers and melon sellers of the town to adorn the stoop that one still encounters almost immediately upon entering the church, the saint would have been set on high—holding his little bowl aloft and pouring the holy water with which he baptized the faithful. In the most poetic iteration in Frick Madison, west of the gallery of Titians and Veroneses is a small chamber occupied by a single painting, Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert (see illustration on page 39). A work that celebrates grace and love, it is bathed in natural light that enters through one of the windows that give onto East 75th Street. Passing through a virtuosic display of Renaissance bronze statuettes choreographed on long shelves in rhythmic sequences, with masterpieces by Bertoldo di Giovanni, Riccio, Antico, and Severo da Ravenna—all of whom have been the subjects of monographic exhibitions (and catalogs) by Frick curators—in cases of honor in the center of the room, the visitor concludes the tour of the third floor in a long gallery devoted to Spanish painting from El Greco to Goya. While one expects to be swept away by Velázquez’s King Philip IV of Spain, which was sensitively restored in 2010, another revelation here are the Frick’s two Spanish full-lengths, which have never appeared more authoritative and impressive. Vincenzo Anastagi, in field armor—the fortyfour-year-old sergeant major of Castel Sant’Angelo seen in momentary repose in El Greco’s swagger portrait—commands the room with his suspicious, unflinching gaze. It has no effect whatsoever on the muscular blacksmith in Goya’s Forge on the opposite wall, who is about to strike the molten sheet with his sledgehammer. A powerful, modern history painting—by no stretch of the imagination can these blacksmiths’ apprentices claim to be Vulcan’s assistants—such a respectful image of preindustrial labor is still unexpected in the collection of the steel magnate who was responsible for the violent breakup of the Homestead Strike in July 1892.
The visit concludes on the fourth floor, which shows French and British works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—from Rococo to Impressionism—in galleries where the ceilings are at their highest: 17' 6", as opposed to 12' 9" on the lower floors. In the mid-1960s, Breuer had arrived at this ceiling height “in consideration of the increasing size of contemporary painting.” And so galleries intended to house Color Field and Abstract Expressionist canvases are now home to grand-manner English full-lengths, James McNeil Whistler’s portrait commissions, and, unforgettably, JeanHonoré Fragonard’s Progress of Love, shown in the two sequences in which the series was produced.
As on the other floors, upon entering the visitor first encounters sculpture: marble portrait busts by Houdon and a terracotta clock by Clodion. A group of the finest eighteenth-century French cabinet paintings follows, but the chief beneficiary of this installation is the room devoted to the decorative arts. Here Balthazar Lieutaud, Ferdinand Berthoud, and Philippe Caffiéri’s astonishing Longcase Regulator Clock, formerly hiding in plain sight at the foot of the staircase leading up to the mansion’s second floor, reveals itself to be among the most elaborate and sumptuous timepieces produced during the ancien régime. The room is further anchored by Jean-Henri Riesener’s Secrétaire and matching Commode, made around 1780 for Queen MarieAntoinette, to furnish her apartments at the Château de Saint-Cloud. In the second half of the eighteenth century, in royal and aristocratic residences, a chest of drawers (commode) was often paired with a tall writing desk (sécretaire), with shelves and compartments inside. Made of marquetry veneered with precious and exotic woods of various hues—which have faded over time—both pieces were initially even more splendid in appearance than they are today. Riesener reworked them a decade later for the queen’s apartment in the Tuileries palace, where the royal family had been compelled to reside after being escorted back to the capital from Versailles in October 1789. The Side Table in Blue Turquin marble with exquisite gilt bronze mounts designed by Pierre Gouthière, one of the museum’s masterpieces of decorative art, has for years sat uncomplainingly in the North Hall underneath Ingres’s much-loved Comtesse d’Haussonville. All three pieces of furniture are now enhanced by garnitures of Sèvres and Meissen porcelains, which are raised a respectful distance, mounted on austere ledges with discreet panels behind them, and given the same reverence as sculpture. These include such rarities as the boat-shaped Sèvres Pot-pourri à Vaisseau, one of only ten surviving examples; the coral-colored and misleadingly named Vase Japon, from the same manufactory, with its silver-gilt mounts, modeled on a Han Dynasty bronze Yu vase from the Chinese imperial collections; and a Pair of Candelabra, with exuberant gilt-bronze mounts by Gouthière, that adorn early Meissen vases, one of which is a late-nineteenthcentury replacement. (Look closely, as you now can, and you will be able to identify which white vase is the genuine article.)
The long gallery devoted to eighteenth-century British painting— in many ways Frick’s favorite school, and the most expensive for Gilded Age collectors—brings together all of the museum’s works by Thomas Gainsborough. It also includes a trio of threequarter-length portraits by William Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Sir Thomas Lawrence, each of which is