Jean-Antoine Houdon’s six-foot-tall sculpture Diana the Huntress (1776–95) spent a lot of the previous 5 years in a field whereas development employees hammered away close by. One of many many treasures owned by the Frick Collection in New York, she stood, lonely and enveloped in wooden, in a nook of the vacant museum. Lots of her longtime neighbors, principally Outdated Grasp work, had been packed away and shipped to the close by Breuer constructing, previously the house of the Whitney Museum, whereas the Frick underwent a large-scale renovation and growth. However the terracotta sculpture was just too fragile to go wherever else.
And so, Diana stayed behind, idly ready out her interval of confinement whereas the museum was rebuilt round her. Now, in the end,she has her second within the solar—with out having ever moved an inch.
Diana has been uncased and returned to view, together with loads of different nice European artworks, on the Frick’s refurbished homebase on Fifth Avenue at seventieth Road. When the museum formally reopens on April 17, will probably be the primary time the general public has been allowed in since March 2020.
Some $220 million was poured into the renovation surrounding Diana, with an extra $110 million put towards different prices, together with the museum’s non permanent relocation, so that you would possibly count on the Frick to look solely completely different. However essentially the most placing factor in regards to the new Frick is that it nonetheless feels virtually precisely the identical. Relying on what you need from the Frick, that’s both a great factor or a foul factor. Should you ask me, it’s somewhat disappointing.
Change doesn’t come rapidly on the Frick, which opened in 1935 as a home museum for the holdings of Henry Clay Frick, an industrialist who amassed a trove of first-class European work. (Frick began out small, shopping for a plain panorama by Pittsburgh painter George Hetzel in 1881, after which expanded his purview to incorporate many acknowledged greats of artwork historical past earlier than his dying in 1919.) Set within the Higher East Aspect mansion the place the robber baron himself as soon as lived, the museum exudes old-world appeal. Jaw-dropping masterpieces by Boucher, Rembrandt, and Vermeer can nonetheless be discovered right here, hung in carpeted galleries decked out with plush chairs and satiny drapes.
Annabelle Selldorf‘s new reception corridor and staircase are two of the extra noticeable additions in her refined renovation of the Frick.
Photograph Nicholas Venezia
This isn’t a museum that could possibly be referred to as youthful—it nonetheless has a coverage that forbids youngsters underneath 10, one thing enforced by virtually no different artwork museum in New York. It’s additionally not a museum that appears a lot excited about reinventing itself, which can be why architect Annabelle Selldorf’s renovation is deliberately much less of a complete overhaul than a quiet revamp.
Her most noticeable interventions could be seen on the second ground, an space that was beforehand closed to the general public. The second ground previously served as places of work to Frick employees members and, earlier than that, because the dwelling quarters of Henry Clay Frick and his spouse Adelaide, whose bed room was situated right here. And whereas these areas are actually closely altered—there’s nary a curator’s desk (or a mattress) to be discovered anymore—they include good homages to their previous lives. George Romney’s 1785 portray Emma Hart, Later Girl Hamilton, as “Nature”, that includes a smiling girl holding a cocker spaniel, as soon as hung close to Frick’s mattress, and is now viewable within the very house the place Frick would have admired it nightly.
The room the place the Fricks as soon as had breakfast is now dwelling to work by members of the Nineteenth-century Barbizon College.
Photograph Joseph Coscia Jr.
There are many different works up right here value admiring right here, too: a ca. 1730 Jean-Siméon Chardin nonetheless life, the primary portray in that style ever acquired by the Frick Assortment; a 1423–25 Gentile da Fabriano portray of an enthroned Virgin Mary that also sparkles, due to its gold leafing; Jean-Étienne Liotard’s Trompe l’Oeil (1771), a portray so exactingly realized that the drawings and plaster reliefs depicted seem three-dimensional. All these works, and most of the others round them, had beforehand been on view on the Frick, some in galleries the place they the place they had been overshadowed by world-famous masterpieces. Right here, due to the additional house afforded to them, these works are exhausting to disregard.
The purpose right here is the artwork, not the renovation. Selldorf, whose previous credit embrace galleries for Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner and the constructing for the Neue Galerie, is understood for sculpting areas which might be minimal, stately, and stylish. It’s form of structure that performs second fiddle to no matter artwork it’s internet hosting. That’s why her revised second ground is so successful—and why her greatest swings elsewhere within the museum, a brand new staircase constituted of Breccia Aurora Blue marble and a cavernous below-ground auditorium, don’t fairly work. These components are just too loud, too eager to announce themselves as costly and recent.
Selldorf’s new auditorium for the Frick.
Photograph Nicholas Venezia
However again to the galleries. The primary ground seems so just like its pre-2020 self that one must play a recreation of spot-the-difference to note any shifts. On the press preview on Tuesday, Selldorf stated she had primarily improved crowd move and illumination, joking that guests “won’t be capable of inform the place the lights have modified.” (I, for one, couldn’t.)
The beloved Fragonard gallery, stuffed with the Rococo painter’s ribald allegories of romantic courtship, returns nearly unchanged, as does the beautiful eating room, whose partitions are hung with towering portraits by the British painter Thomas Gainsborough. Additionally again is Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis within the Desert (ca. 1475–80). Put aside a couple of minutes to get reacquainted with this work, among the finest items of artwork to be discovered wherever in New York, which might now be seen in a brand new gentle—actually, due to Selldorf’s cautious work.
Solely a handful of works are new to view on the Frick. One is Giovanni Battista Moroni’s Portrait of a Lady (ca. 1575), by which a leery-eyed girl stares down at her viewer, urgent her lips into the faintest of sneers. The Moroni portray was acquired in 2023; on the time, the museum trumpeted it as the primary portrait of a Renaissance girl ever to enter its assortment. However there isn’t any such hoopla right here. It hangs mutely above two Qing Dynasty vases, all of which go uncaptioned.
The Frick’s famed West Gallery has been largely unchanged, save for refined lighting results.
Photograph Joseph Coscia Jr.
The Frick continues to take an old-school strategy to the artwork on view, which is offered sans didactics (as has traditionally been the case). Previously, the shortage of wall textual content has been a aid: all you wanted for an enriching museum expertise, the Frick appeared to counsel, was artwork itself. However extra context is now required, particularly in terms of among the ornamental artworks on view. Close to the Houdon Diana sculpture, for instance, there may be an array of Meissen porcelain items, together with one exhibiting a person—a Chinese language man, per the Met, which owns an analogous work—holding a flower to an unnaturally massive fowl. It’s complicated that wares resembling this are offered with out commentary, and even odder that precise Chinese language vases close by aren’t demarcated from the European porcelains they impressed, centuries later.
Unusually for a reopened museum, the Frick has not rehung its assortment, which stays principally because it has for a couple of century. That makes the Frick—which doesn’t appear to be certain by the type of strict everything-remains-as-is founding doc seen at different collectors’ museums—fairly in contrast to different establishments in New York. Two years in the past, for instance, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork wholly redid its European paintings galleries, with extra works by girls and extra wall texts referring to race, gender, and colonialism. The Frick, against this, appears completely unaffected by the upheaval of the previous 5 years, with neither of these issues to boast.
Can the Frick be a part of our instances? It definitely tried to just do that in its temporary Breuer residency, the place one of many displays, in 2023, was a Barkley Hendricks survey. Right here, loaned work of Black People from the twentieth century mingled with portraits of white Europeans by Bronzino, Van Dyck, and Rembrandt from the Frick’s holdings. The present recommended that Hendricks noticed the Outdated Masters anew and implied that we’d be smart to do the identical.
The Fragonard room is again, largely with out adjustments.
Photograph Joseph Coscia Jr.
The Frick appears to not have heeded its personal recommendation, and that’s the greatest disgrace of this reopened museum. The one modern artwork on view proper now by the Ukrainian artist Vladimir Kanevsky, whose sculpted vases stuffed with porcelain flowers limply check with floral preparations proven on the Frick in 1935, the 12 months it opened to the general public. It is a museum that has been stunted—it’s trapped prior to now. (Three new galleries by Selldorf might be for a slate of particular exhibitions that features some modern artwork programming, however these areas aren’t open but.)
The brand new Frick is the previous Frick, for higher and for worse. It’s not a museum that gives a lot in the way in which of art-historical innovation, however it’s nonetheless a pleasing place to whereas away a wet afternoon. And apart from, you’d should be a real sourpuss to argue with the sheer magnitude of nice artwork on view. The excellent news is that, with Selldorf’s growth, there’s solely extra of it.
