5.28.25 — Entering History
To continue from last time on a larger home for the Frick Collection, I am used by now to museum expansions, and museums are all but obliged to have them. The New Museum, once a fancy designation for one-room installations curated by its founder, Marcia Tucker, is letting its stacked boxes tumble south along the Bowery (a work in progress), and the Met will soon revamp its incursion on Central Park for modern and contemporary art.
A 2015 home for the Whitney by Renzo Piano still looks like a hospital or a prison, but it works very well indeed. A 2019 expansion almost rescues the Museum of Modern Art from its disaster of an expansion in 2004. Piano reveled in excess again at the Morgan Library in 2016, moving the entrance from J. P. Morgan’s actual library to an atrium devoid of art. The Bronx Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Princeton University Museum are wrapping up their expansions right now—and, sad to say, I could go on.
But never mind. I have lost that battle long ago. Museum-goers no doubt deserve a place to eat and an education center—the thrust of a Lower East Side building for the International Center of Photography. Even the Morgan puts out children’s books and crayons in its atrium. And the expanded Frick Collection looks promising enough from the outside. Little above ground is brand new, and additions adopt the same Indiana limestone as Carrère and Hastings for the mansion in 1914 and John Russell Page for the museum in 1935. The garden looks lusher than ever, and it seems only right that the Frick reopened April 17, at the height of spring.
The architects have their priorities, and they are good ones. The same grand old entrance now leads to a larger ticketing area to handle larger crowds, with the restaurant safely upstairs. Better yet, unlike at the Morgan Library, I could then head back from there the old way, to the magnificent indoor fountain and beyond. To be sure, I had better things to see than a fountain, however grand. But I had found comfort there many a time after a walk from the subway. Selldorf Architects and Beyer Blinder Belle could have been thinking of me all along.
I stepped next into the same room as in the past, largely for James McNeill Whistler, and then to its right, where traveling exhibitions have often displaced Thomas Gainsborough. There is as yet no sign of them, although “Vermeer’s Love Letters” is already on its way. Nor is there is a contemporary artist or two to make history “relevant” to newcomers, although the Frick is not above that museum fashion either. Instead, to Whistler’s left, I could walk right into the Frick’s largest room and my most precious memories. There a woman sits for her maid bearing a letter—one of three paintings in the collection, all by Jan Vermeer, that place men and women in a larger world of maps, signs, budding empires, and love. Like her, so much of my feelings about art come out of the Frick, along with this Web site, and I shall try not to mention them all.
That room also has a seated self-portrait by Rembrandt, all but enthroned without possessions, apart from rags and an artist’s imaginings. It has his Polish Rider, which had me arguing for the value of critics, historians, and attributions in keeping the past alive. As I continued to other rooms, I could encounter again Salisbury Cathedral by John Constable, with his uncanny mix of Romanticism and precision—and Saint Francis by Giovanni Bellini, with sunlight and the stigmata as a single gift of god. Portraits by Titian hang to either side, from an artist old and young. That Rococo playroom and garden, from François Boucher, still lies beyond, crazy as ever. Even I have offered a token defense.
They could serve as a pocket history of Western art, as textbooks once saw it and as new generations renew it. To help, the Frick has preserved its old-fashioned labels rather than tedious wall text—directing visitors to their phones and Bloomberg Connects for more. To help, too, renovation has included a “skylight project,” like the Met’s but with less hoo-hah, for a healthy cleaning to let in the light. Exterior light itself now enters a glass-enclosed corridor surrounding the garden. For the first time I found myself aware of which rooms face Fifth Avenue and the park. I might have found a map, and I wrap things up next time on where it took me.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.