From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
To look at a picture of the library in the Frick residence taken by Ira W. Martin in 1927 is to see a room that seems entirely immobile. It is not only the placing of the furniture – everything is at just the right angle, just as it can be only in a house so well staffed that not even a paper is left lying around – but also a quality of the photographs of this era that seems to make everything heavier. The blacks look almost exaggerated, as though they weigh down the furniture. But this colouration is inseparable from a certain view of these Gilded Age mansions, as though it confirms the weight and significance of this way of living. It is not just the light playing off the decoration of gilt that we are seeing, but the heavy metal of steel that underpins it. Everything in this series of pictures taken by the Frick family’s first photographer-in-residence seems designed to make the viewers take Henry Clay Frick and, by extension, his collection, seriously.
Of course, there is no need to employ tricks of photography to make us take either the residence and its contents or the man seriously. His bequest to New York City, one of the most significant collections ever amassed by a private individual, takes care of that. Perhaps that is part of what Frick was doing when he left his collection to the public. His pursuit of the very best, from a Rembrandt self-portrait of 1658 once owned by the Earl of Ilchester to Bellini’s St Francis in the Desert (c. 1475–80), Titian’s Portrait of a man in a red cap (c. 1520) and Bronzino’s Lodovico Capponi (c. 1550–55) – the last three all bought in a single year, 1915 – reveals a commitment to putting together a collection of the very highest quality, even though no collector can fully guarantee such a valuable thing will continue as a single entity beyond their own lifetime.
Frick, an industrialist who made his money in coke and steel, decided to turn his collection into a museum after he visited the Wallace Collection in London. Most visitors to the Frick focus on the beauty of the artworks and the good taste of the collection, rather than thinking about the man behind them. Frick was friends with Andrew Mellon, J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, robber barons of such fortune that their names are still plastered on banks and buildings across the United States and beyond. Such wealth doesn’t come cheap; someone has to pay for it. One of the most infamous incidents of Frick’s life was the Homestead strike, when he hired 300 men from the Pinkerton Detective Agency to secure a steelworks he ran with Carnegie. The steelworkers launched a counterstrike that resulted in the deaths of nine strikers and seven guards, as well as hundreds of wounded men. An anarchist tried to assassinate Frick; he survived.
The Library of the Frick residence in 1927, photographed by Ira W. Martin. Courtesy the Frick Collection / Frick Art Research Library Archives
Frick was ruthless in art collecting as well as business. He researched markets, he knew the value of everything and he wanted the best. On the rare occasions he failed to acquire the work he wanted he let his disappointment be known. ‘CONSIDER MYSELF TO HAVE BEEN TRIFLED WITH,’ he cabled the dealer Charles Carstairs when the British government intervened to prevent the sale to him of Holbein’s Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan (1538). But there is a strong possibility that he saw art and industry in the same light. When Frick once compared the security of railroad bonds to Rembrandts it cut both ways. In the end, to a businessman, they’re both just assets.
For the past four years, the Frick has been trying to maximise its own assets. The museum officially closed in March 2021, mid-pandemic, for a major refurbishment, moving the works from Frick’s house on Fifth Avenue to the Breuer building, formerly the Whitney Museum, on Madison Avenue. Seeing the collection in the brutalist setting of the Breuer was startling enough – but so was the fact that the Frick itself had finally closed for renovations.
Ever since it became a museum in 1931, the Beaux-Arts house had consistently failed to get planning permission for the alterations it needed. When the house first became a museum, the architect John Russell Pope expanded the building, including adding the Garden Court. In 1977, the British landscape designer Russell Page laid out the adjoining garden on East 70th Street. It was intended to be viewed from the house rather than visited. Yet despite its typically good lines and architecture, held together by the rectangular pond at its centre, the combination of pear, hydrangea, clematis and wisteria ensure that it is a flowering garden all year round. Since then, it has been a challenge to effect any dramatic change at the Frick. Indeed, the garden proved an obstacle to a proposal in 2014 for a six-storey extension that would have required its destruction. That was a step too far for many conservationists. ‘Gardens are works of art,’ said the dean of the Yale architecture school at the time.
Lodovico Capponi (c. 1550–55), Bronzino. Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Joseph Cosica Jr.
With the refurbishment now complete, visitors will notice that the garden is still very much intact. They might even notice, if they look closely, that it has been restored, the planting subtly updated and the pond fixed so that it no longer leaks. Rather than expanding upwards, as in the scheme plotted out in 2014, the Frick turned to the doyenne of remodelling, Annabelle Selldorf. Ever since she completed the design on David Zwirner’s Chelsea gallery in 2013, a temple of tasteful concrete and white walls, Selldorf has been the architect to deliver functional art spaces that draw coos of wonder at their restrained chic. The National Gallery in London is set to reveal a Selldorf extension and reworking of the Sainsbury wing in May (this has caused more of a stir than such changes do in New York).
Selldorf has form with Beaux-Arts houses. One of her best known projects is her updating of what is now the Neue Galerie, a few blocks north of the Frick. The original building was designed by Carrère and Hastings, who also happen to be the original architects of the Frick house. Selldorf describes the Frick as ‘one of my favourite museums’ and sees her goal as working ‘to ensure that what we built at once preserved the special character of the “place” but allowed it to serve the goals and needs of a museum in the 21st century more fully’. Frick famously eschewed ornamentation on the exterior of his house – for all his love of works of art and the apparent lavishness of his collection, there is something sober about his taste – and insisted that the limestone facades stay simple and unadorned. They have.
When I arrive at the Frick on a surprisingly warm February afternoon, the building is still semi-wrapped in scaffolding. Workmen have begun to take it down, as though a giant present for the city is being revealed. I enter through the staff entrance and up through a lift that deposits you in the middle of the house. From this position it is hard to tell exactly what has been done to the building over the past four years. And perhaps that’s exactly as it should be. Much work has been done on what many might consider invisible parts of the building: air conditioning and climate control, the glass in the skylights and the ambient lighting. The Frick continues to light every painting with a picture light – they were being installed when I visited – but the chandeliers that are so familiar now contain a crown of pixie lights at the top to make the rooms brighter overall.
Saint Francis in the Desert (c. 1475–80), Giovanni Bellini. Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Michael Bodycomb
Then there is the question of wall coverings. Swatches of the original fabrics used for the public rooms were found in the cedar cupboard at the top of the house, untouched by human hand (and, more importantly, moths). The Frick, in keeping with its tradition of using only the best, went back to the source for these fabrics and so the silk textile mill Prelle, based in Lyon, was commissioned to make the new green damasks, just as it had been commissioned a hundred years ago. Each pane of glass in the skylight that runs the length of the West Gallery has also been restored. Possibly the only thing that doesn’t work exactly as it did in the time of Henry Clay Frick are the call buttons in the middle of the room. Tucked discreetly beneath Turner’s Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet Boat: Evening (1826) you will see buttons to summon the valet, housekeeper, secretary, butler or pantry staff. An English house, of course, would have just the one bell in each room and it’s the servants who would have to identify the necessary role. But perhaps that’s democracy in action.
One of the most striking developments is in one of the smallest rooms. The narrow portico gallery, with its line of French windows overlooking a second garden, on Fifth Avenue, has always felt like you are entering a private space. For many years it has been used to display porcelain, and still will be – but in an act that feels almost reckless, the display of Meissen and Chinese porcelain will no longer be mediated by any protective cases. It makes the small room feel even more charged and transforms the statue by Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828) at the end of the gallery from Diana the Huntress to Diana the protectress. This is a luxury afforded an institution that does not admit those under 10.
There are two much more obvious changes to the building, each in a very different tone. The first is that the upstairs (what the English call the first floor and Americans call the second floor) is now open to the public. Former offices have been returned to the layout that the family knew. Observant visitors will also have spotted that the Boucher room is no longer on the ground floor. It has returned to its original place in the house, taking over what was the director’s office. But before visitors get to this they will walk through a series of other rooms. There’s the breakfast room, filled with the Barbizon school works that so entranced Frick at the start of his collecting career, then the clocks and watches room, followed by the Impressionist room, where you will find Frick’s irresistible Manet, The Bullfight (1864). After that is the small hallway with its painted ceiling by John Alden Twachtman, the cerulean blue unlike anything else in the house; the Chinoiserie-style monkeys playing around the border more like something from the Villa Ephrussi than the Upper East Side – though that’s probably the point. Finally, the Boucher room, with its Versailles marquetry floor and French furniture, feels at home back in its original site.
The Boucher room, restored to its position on the first floor of the residence. Photo: Joseph Cosica Jr.
This restoration tells the story of the house more clearly, too. Before Frick moved in, he engaged Elsie de Wolfe to decorate the upstairs, or at least the ladies’ rooms. She specialised in a quasi-French style and took responsibility for both interior design and artworks. The 10 per cent commission she took on every work she bought for Frick would make this the most lucrative job of her career, even though the family mostly preferred prints in her rooms. De Wolfe is often credited for the Boucher room. Yet lurking in the background, as so often in the Frick collection, is Joseph Duveen, the art dealer who did so much to define the collections of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Duveen persuaded the Fricks to dismantle De Wolfe’s scheme and install wood panelling designed by André Carlhian, which, as Ian Wardropper writes in his excellent book The Fricks Collect (Rizzoli), included ‘a mirrored wall cabinet, which was conveniently sized for a group of Sèvres porcelains. With this masterstroke, Duveen was able to sell more porcelain and small tables to complement the furnishings already present.’
The new upstairs allows the museum to show off the collections it has acquired in the past 50 years. This is a sensitive subject. Frick died suddenly in 1919, leaving the museum with an endowment of $15 million for its upkeep. His daughter Helen took over the running of the collection and continued to add to it, bringing in many of the trecento and quattrocento works that are so renowned, such as Duccio’s The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain (1308–11) and The Flagellation of Christ by Cimabue (c. 1280). Her taste was more religious and she favoured earlier works than her father did; Helen even turned down a Vermeer on the grounds that the collection had three already. But she would not countenance anyone other than the family adding to the collection. When John D. Rockefeller Jr. attempted to donate some works, including a panel by Piero della Francesca, Helen sued the trustees. She lost the case, paving the way for the museum to accept donations.
The fruits of these are on show upstairs, including the Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher collection of commemorative medals, which is now overlooked by a stern portrait from 1478–85 of Doge Giovanni Mocenigo by Gentile Bellini. Most affectingly, in the room that was Henry’s bedroom, Romney’s portrait of Emma Hamilton, the lover of Admiral Nelson, now hangs where it did at the time of his death, on the wall opposite his bed. Facing her is the Frick’s other famous female portrait, Louise de Broglie by Ingres (1845), a work bought by Helen.
The stairs up to the newly opened first floor of the Frick Collection. Photo: Joseph Cosica Jr.
The extra rooms and expanded display enrich the pleasure of visiting the Frick, but they do not constitute a project that, on its own, would require the work of a leading architect. Where Selldorf has come in is to improve the extraneous parts of the Frick – the entrance hall, the offices and the education centre. Through an ingenious use of the site plan, Selldorf has managed to remove an HVAC unit and so magic up space for the offices on the first floor. She has connected the mansion and the Frick Art Library for the first time. Perhaps most importantly, Selldorf has excavated the space under Russell Page’s garden, which used to contain a bomb shelter used for storage, to house a new music room, freeing up the old one to become a space for special exhibitions. The underground space, which doesn’t contain a single straight line, is a magical place. It’s a quiet bubble beneath the roar of the city where the acoustics promise endless evenings of musical delight.
For all the importance of the more behind-the-scenes areas, however, it is the entrance hall, clad in Botticino Classico marble, and the enormous Aurora Breccia Blue marble staircase with brass handrail, that visitors will really notice. There is no doubt that it appears to have been completed with a Frickian level of expenditure but, as with the original building, all the ostentatiousness and ornament reside in the materials alone. If naming the marble seems a little too rarefied, it is worth noting that, as Selldorf says, ‘We began by taking a rather extensive inventory of the types of stone, marble and wood that were used throughout the building and built our palette from that.’ Both these marbles exist elsewhere in the house and, if ever a project demands connoisseurship, this is surely the one.
Frick created his museum to ensure that the sliver of order he had carved out for himself remained for everyone else. But as I walked around the mansion in its state of near completion, something else became apparent. While the works of art were all there, and it became more possible than ever to appreciate the subtlety of hanging Whistler’s portrait of Lady Meux on a wall that is almost the same elusive colour as her dress, it wasn’t so much the permanence of the order that was apparent as the fragility. In the library, three chairs were pushed together to make room for the engineers to install the picture lights. Walking into the room was like walking into an English country house just after redecoration.
In a sense, that is what was happening. Over the fire hung a portrait of the man who made all this possible. In the corner is the portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, an autograph copy of a work that perished in a fire. The exact positioning of the chairs was to be finalised. Visitors to the Frick will see the order restored, but seeing it mid-installation is a reminder that however permanent this version of the world looks, the story it tells is much more contingent. When the museum reopens to the public on 17 April it will be up to the new director, Axel Rüger, to steer the Frick’s course through the many currents of history available to it – rail bonds or Rembrandt – and decide which one is true for the institution now.
Portrait of Henry Clay Frick (1943), John Christen Johansen. Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Michael Bodycomb
The Frick Collection in New York reopens on 17 April.
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.