5.25.25 — From Mansion to Museum
It’s the perfect long weekend to celebrate this. I have never had a map to the Frick Collection. I never needed one. From the moment I returned to New York after college, it was a place to call home, and now it is back.
It was a place to find myself and to discover art, just as Central Park across the street had served me in growing up as a place to find myself and New York. Not that I shall ever have an actual home like the Frick, a stone mansion with ever so many rooms. Nor should I want one, when the city has so many marvelously adult places to work and to play. But Henry Clay Frick did, and his children could come downstairs in the morning to what has since become a museum for the likes of Rembrandt and Jan Vermeer. Wall paintings transform a room into a Rococo garden in defiance of gravity and Central Park, with a commanding cast in portraits to chastise me for my frivolity. The collection runs from the early Renaissance to the early twentieth century, with so much more along the way.
Now, though, I had to wonder. At last, the Frick invites visitors upstairs, if not for breakfast, then for a proper café and still more room for art. It has emerged from expansion, remodeling, and recovery with almost a third more exhibition space, a larger auditorium below ground, and other features of a modern museum. I wondered if I might need a map after all, and I should not begrudge you if you do. It is a respectful expansion all the same—respectful enough that one would need to look long and hard to know what has moved and why. It has earned uniform critical praise, but still I felt out of place in the old family rooms upstairs—and I tell you why in two posts, starting next time.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.