Over the decades, I’ve at-tended a number of special shows at the Frick Museum, and they were frequently eye-opening. But it is the permanent collection, always consistently and faithfully on display, which has been my real reason for going to the Frick during just about every one of my New York stays.
To visit that grand old mansion on the corner of 70th Street and Fifth Avenue was always a joy in itself: a respite from the busyness of the city, an immersion in luxurious beauty, a fantasy that I myself was the rightful inhabitant of those magical rooms. (This only worked if I could manage to forget about the unpleasant means by which Mr. Henry Clay Frick had acquired all his money and his art—but since this caveat applies to many of the great collections in America, I have long since gotten used to brushing it under the Aubusson carpets.)
When I taught “New York and the Arts” at Hunter College, I’d always take my freshmen on a field trip to the nearby Frick. I would show them my favorite pictures—the Whistlers, the Vermeers—and explain why I loved them; they in turn would sharpen their critical skills by disagreeing with me and choosing their own favorites. And each year a few of them, enchanted by the light-filled central courtyard with its foliage, statuary, and marble benches, would vow to return there on their own to read during breaks from classes.
Even without my students, a visit to the Frick always has something of the aura of a pilgrimage. I never go there in order to cover the ground. Instead, I pop in to make the rounds of the things I love best, and in doing so I skip much of what is hung on the walls or displayed on the tabletops and cabinet shelves. A lot of the Frick’s holdings have become mere background to my reunions with my aesthetic touchstones. I rarely notice what I have not come to see, and even my acts of homage have evolved into something a bit routine: Holbeins, check; Rembrandts, check; Turners, check.
So it was with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation that I planned a trip to the new, temporary Frick Madi-son, recently installed in the Marcel Breuer building at the corner of Madison and 75th. Here, in what was once the Whitney Museum and then, more briefly, the Met Breuer, a midcentury Brutalist landmark has now been reconditioned to house the Frick collection during the several years it will take to renovate and augment the old mansion on East 70th.
These being Covid times, I had to reserve my visit in advance and also pay full price. (Since I’d previously gotten away with press-pass visits, teacher exemptions, and free opening hours, the $17 ticket price came as something of a shock.) What this meant in practice was that (a) the pool of my fellow viewers would be artificially limited, so I would have the space to linger in front of anything I chose; and (b) I would probably want to spend serious time looking at everything, in order to get my money’s worth.
The woman scanning digital tickets at the ground-floor entrance told me that the three floors of the show were arranged by region. If I wanted to go through them in roughly chronological order, she advised, I should start on Floor Two and work my way up to Floor Four. I, however, always prefer to take the elevator to the top floor of a museum and work my way downward by staircase—and this is especially true of the Breuer building, which features achingly slow elevators, not to mention an elegant concrete-lined stairwell that is always a pleasure to return to. So I started at the fourth floor, where mainly French and English paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were displayed.
Oy vey! Who knew how much crap Henry Clay Frick had managed to accumulate? Certainly not me, because for years I had made a habit of skipping the Boucher and Fragonard rooms whenever I visited the old mansion. And all those endless English portraits by the likes of Reynolds, Romney, and Gainsborough…I mean, how many of these does one collection need? And where in the world had they been on my previous visits?
Probably separating the Whistlers, I deduced, when I finally encountered my four darlings in a little room by themselves. Normally these four—the portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland (Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink), the portrait of Miss Rosa Corder (Arrangement in Brown and Black), the portrait of Lady Meux (Harmony in Pink and Gray), and the portrait of Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac (Arrangement in Black and Gold)—hang at the four corners of a very long room. There they seem to be glancing superciliously at each other down the length or width of the room, meanwhile ignoring the ranks of interlopers who come in between them. Crushed together in this smaller space, the Whistlers seemed at first to lose some of their stature: despite the pronounced verticality of the human-sized canvases, they even felt markedly less tall than they had in their regular spot. But I still derived all my usual pleasure from encountering them. I remembered with delight, as I always do, that the Comte de Montesquiou had been one of Proust’s models for the Baron de Charlus, and I again took note of the fact that precisely the thing I loved about Mrs. Leyland’s portrait—the way her back is turned to us, with her face only visible from the side—was what bothered my students about the picture.
Elsewhere on this floor, after fleeing through rooms of Bouchers and Fragonards (not to mention endless displays of valuable tchotchkes that I would die rather than have in my own house), I found at last the two Turners, Cologne: The Arrival of a Packet Boat: Evening and The Harbor of Dieppe. Again, they had been reduced from the emperors of a vast room to the sole occupants of a small one, but here that actually helped me see them better. The lighting was excellent, and in the peace of the nearly empty space, where the paintings had been brought down to my own (admittedly short) eye level, I was able to examine those miraculous brushstrokes closely and at leisure.
Downward, then, to the third floor, which focused on Spanish and Italian art. It was here that I really began to comprehend the virtues of the rehang. A stellar Bellini, St. Francis in the Desert, got a whole room to itself—and though I might disagree with those who consider this the prize work of the collection, I did feel it warranted the exclusive attention. A tiny Cimabue, normally displayed in a back room with a bunch of icons, jumped forward at me in all its beauty against the bare gray walls of the Breuer building. The Murillos, Goyas, and El Grecos, too, benefited from the lack of frou-frou surrounding them; and though I never neglect the El Grecos when I am there, and am always attentive to the Goyas, I was surprised at how much I appreciated the Murillo Self-Portrait this time, with its haughty glance and speakingly Spanish mouth. I was also drawn to a Bronzino that I normally pass right by in the old mansion. Ensconced on the clean, well-lit walls of the Frick Madi-son, this portrait of Lodovico Capponi —with his long, pale face and reddish-tinged hair framed by a green drapery background—struck me for the first time as one of Bronzino’s classics.
It was not until I reached the second and final floor of the exhibit, though, that the advantages of the new hang came through most strongly. And here, too, I was fully vindicated in my decision to take the floors in reverse numerical order. For now I ended up with what is for me the heart of the Frick collection: its Northern European and particularly its Dutch masters.
Nobody in New York (nobody outside the Netherlands, I venture to say) has such uniformly high-quality Rembrandts as the Frick. Even the Metropolitan Museum, though it has many more, seems beggared by the comparison, if you focus on quality rather than quantity. To find in one room three such masterpieces as these—the strange and alluring Polish Rider of 1655, the sad, wise, elderly Self-Portrait from 1658, and the unusually sharp, utterly ambivalent painting of the merchant Nicolaes Ruts from 1631—is to see Rembrandt at his wide-ranging best. And to have them lit as they were in the Breuer building is, in a way, to see them for the very first time.
But the Netherlandish riches do not stop here. The Frans Hals portraits glow on these walls. Their ruddy cheeks and straightforward glances seem warm and kind here, rather than carelessly ribald, as such features do in Hals’s more grotesque renderings. And an entirely new slant, perhaps inspired by Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, has been given to the two Holbeins that figure so prominently in Wolf Hall. Here Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More are placed face to face, rather than being separated by a massive fireplace, as they always were in the original mansion. Now these two historic antagonists appear to be staring each other down, as indeed they did in real life, and the effect is nothing short of thrilling.
And the Vermeers! They are the three pictures I return to every time, no matter how brief my visit to the Frick is, and I have loved them dearly from the moment I first saw them. To me, Officer and Laughing Girl, Girl Interrupted at Her Music, and Mistress and Maid—all tenderly illuminated from the left side of the canvas, and all portraying intimate two-person scenes —show Vermeer at his inimitable best. (Again, I would set this in contrast to the Met, where the current exhibit “In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at the Met” includes the appalling Allegories of the Catholic Faith along with that museum’s better and more typical Vermeers.)
At the old Frick, Mistress and Maid hung by itself in the same huge room as the Rembrandts, the Halses, and the Turners, while the other two appeared, though kept slightly apart, on one side of a “corridor” gallery. Here they have all been grouped together in one well-lit room, and the result is that they can speak their virtues anew, separately and together. When they are side by side, we can see that only the girl interrupted, out of all six figures in all three paintings, is looking directly at us. And we can also notice that, in comparison to the sharp clarity of the two pictures featuring male-female pairs, an almost indetectable blurring effect accompanies the mistress and maid. Is this because that painting allows us to peer into a more intimate kind of communication—a privacy that is being protected by a slight lack of focus? Or is it merely that the texture of the fur which lines the mistress’s rich gown has inspired a similarly soft texture throughout? We will never know; certainly Vermeer, that most discreet of painters, will never tell us.
A surprise gift awaited me toward the end of my Frick Madison visit. On one wall, mixed in among other things I vaguely recognized, was a tiny Bruegel called The Three Soldiers. Painted in the spectrum that runs from brown to white, it has more affinity, perhaps, with his elusively haunting drawings and etchings than it does with the larger paintings for which he is better known. I was so amazed to find this Bruegel on the wall (I had no memory of ever seeing it before) that I asked the guard if I could take a picture with my phone.
“No,” he shook his head, “no pictures allowed.”
Not a problem: I, and for that matter you, can find it easily online. But of course the reproduction never does justice to the original, and I am grateful to the new Frick Madison for highlighting this little gem and giving me the temporary pleasure of its company. As I left the building, I asked one staff member where it had hung in the original mansion.
“Oh, I think it was in a little ante-room outside the Bouchers,” she answered.
“No wonder,” I murmured to myself. That’s what I get for skipping things.
Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review. Her latest book, Scandinavian Noir, came out as a paperback in May.
