On Monday morning, Xavier Salomon was walking around the empty art-stuffed mansion built by the Gilded Age steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, taking in his favorite views during a rare moment of complete solitude. Were the building still a house, it would be the largest in Manhattan, but since the 1930s it’s been open to the public as the Frick Collection, home to the industrialist’s incredibly stacked collection of Old Masters. Salomon, the dapper chief curator, strolled the marble hallways in silence until reaching the Living Hall, sun streaming in from windows displaying the full vantage of the East Green of Central Park. Two portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger flanked an El Greco above the fireplace. On the other side was Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, perhaps the Italian’s masterpiece, and just about as good as painting gets on earth.
Henry Clay Frick made his fortune in the coke fields outside Pittsburgh and came to Manhattan with a net worth of billions when adjusted for inflation, ready to manipulate the markets with Andrew Carnegie, a fellow Pittsburgh businessman who moved a block down from Frick after becoming the richest man on the planet. St. Francis hangs exactly as it did when Frick lived in the joint 100-plus years ago.
“This room, particularly, is probably the most intact room of the whole house, so here I feel like you really feel the spirit of Frick,” Salomon said. “And we know that in the evening Frick would go in the galleries and sit on a sofa and smoke a cigar, mostly probably in the big gallery. But I can always imagine when I see the sofa in this room that he was smoking a cigar while looking at works of art.”
In a few weeks, Salomon will no longer be padding around the house, luxuriating in Mr. Frick cosplay. After five years of extensive renovations, the museum will reopen to the public April 17, with a $220 million facelift and a new expansion by Annabelle Selldorf that manages to blend seamlessly into the robber baron’s original manse. The new structure will house the offices, auditorium, special exhibitions gallery, and new ticketing venue, freeing up crucial space in the original house—including the living quarters of the Frick family, which has been off-limits to visitors for more than a century.
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The board used to hold its meetings in Frick’s bedroom, where he died. (“Almost as if the ghost of Frick is in this room,” Salomon told me while we stood in it.) But now that room has Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville, one of the nation’s most celebrated paintings, according to critic Sebastian Smee. Charles Baudelaire was also a fan.
For much of the half-decade interregnum, The Frick’s masterpieces were hung at the Breuer Building on Madison Avenue, but there was something a bit off about seeing the works outside of their acquired habitat, removed from the context of the temple to Gilded Age opulence. Across a wide spectrum of the art world, from the ultracontemporary artists to the crotchety Old Masters experts, it seems that just about everybody loves The Frick. Poets love The Frick. T.S. Eliot gave a seminal lecture on Milton in front of the Fragonards, and Frank O’Hara mentions Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider in “Having a Coke with You”: “And anyway it’s in the Frick / which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time.”
Lifelong devotees of The Frick include artists as different as David Hockney and Frank Stella, and filmmakers as different as Wim Wenders and John Waters. Stan Lee modeled the Avengers mansion in the Marvel comics after The Frick. A 2021 book, The Sleeve Should Be Illegal, collected Frick fan letters from a motley crew of contributors, among them Victoria Beckham, Lena Dunham, Lydia Davis, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, and the novelist Jonathan Lethem, who used to sneak into The Frick as a teenager. The late New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl went to every museum on earth, and The Frick was his favorite.
“You can’t believe how many people have told me that The Frick is their favorite museum,” said Axel Rüger, the new director of the museum, who took over from longtime steward Ian Wardropper just weeks before the reopening.
Rüger was standing in the new subterranean auditorium at the press preview last week, addressing what appeared to be hundreds of arts and culture reporters—an incredible turnout for a museum press conference.
“It is the world’s favorite museum,” he said.
A somewhat outrageous proclamation. But how off is it, really? Let’s talk about the home museums of that era, all of which have a special place among the museum landscape. There’s the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, with its gobsmacking trove of Impressionist and post-Impressionist biggies—but technically it’s no longer in Albert C. Barnes’s home; it’s in downtown Philly. There’s the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, a jewel box housing the collection of the turn-of-the-century Boston heiress, and the site of the still-unsolved heist of some of its most iconic paintings: Vermeer’s The Concert, a large double-portrait Rembrandt, and many others. The homes of Sir Richard Wallace in London, Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, and Édouard André in Paris—they are similar in spirit to The Frick, insofar as they are homes of collectors that now operate as museums.
But they are not the Frick Collection. The Frick is in the middle of the most important island in the world, steps away from the 6 train. There are no white cubes, no glass in front of the canvases, no selfies—photography is prohibited—and it has one of the greatest collections of art ever assembled by an American.
“It’s the quality of the pieces—it’s a small house that has three Vermeers, it has three Rembrandts, it has the greatest Bellini in the world, it has El Greco and Titian,” Salomon told me, standing in front of said Bellini. “It has the largest and most important cycle of Fragonard paintings in the world. It has a spectacular collection of Gainsboroughs. I was talking to a curator from The Met the other day who was like, ‘Why don’t we have Gainsboroughs as good as yours?’ And I was like, ‘Well, you don’t.’”
One of those Gainsboroughs, The Mall in St. James’s Park, was acquired for Frick by Joseph Duveen, the greatest art dealer of the 20th century, who extracted Old Masters and Renaissance gems from the fading aristocratic classes of Europe in the decades before and after the Great War. The nobility had paintings on the walls of their ancestral castles but dwindling fortunes; the emergent mega-rich Americans, who sucked oil and steel from the continent and made fortunes speculating on the railroads and industrialized factories, had plenty of money and wanted to spend it.
And Frick spent an outrageous amount of money on art—hundreds of millions in today’s dollars. He also spent $5 million, the equivalent of more than $150 million today when adjusted for inflation, to buy the park-side property and build the house, and left $15 million, worth around $290 million in today’s dollars, to be spent on the maintenance and expansion of his collection. He began collecting as an obsession when he moved his family to New York in 1905, first occupying a house built by William Vanderbilt, on Fifth Avenue in Midtown. (It was torn down in the 1940s to make way for office buildings.) He bought works by Van Eyck, Vermeer, and Rembrandt, paying $225,000 for the Dutch master’s haunting self-portrait that now hangs in the Frick Collection’s West Gallery—the largest private space in New York when completed in 1915.
That Gainsborough purchase earned Frick a Times headline—the way that today it’s global news when Jeff Bezos buys an Ed Ruscha at Christie’s. But it would be a stretch to say that for most of his lifetime the man was mostly known as an art collector. In the 1890s he gained notoriety for his role in the Homestead strike, which resulted in a wave of violence at Carnegie Steel’s mills downriver from Pittsburgh. After workers occupied the factory to prevent scabs from crossing the picket line, Frick sent in 300 gun-toting Pinkerton agents to quell the rebellion. A gunfight ensued. By the time Frick convinced the governor to send in the National Guard, seven workers and three guards had been killed and dozens wounded. The public outcry was such that a few weeks later, the anarchist Alexander Berkman managed to shoot Frick in the shoulder and the neck, hoping his assassination would inspire workers still striking to rise up against capitalist forces. Frick survived and crushed the union, with the government eventually putting the strike organizers on trial.
By the time of his death, Frick had laundered his reputation enough that his Times obituary mentioned the art first, and among the collectors of the day, he was in good company. Duveen was also advising his pals, like Andrew Mellon, the banking titan; J.P. Morgan, the founder of U.S. Steel; and John Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil. They all built up remarkable art collections, much of which is on public view. Morgan’s trove was given to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he had been the chairman of the board, solidifying its status as the preeminent museum in the country. And Mellon donated his massive cultural holdings to the government in order to found the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. There, you can see Raphael’s The Alba Madonna, which Mellon wrested from the Soviet Union in 1931, a century after Czar Nicholas had acquired it from a London financier who had bought it from the 13th Duchess of Alba.
But Frick kept his works not just to himself, but at his house, in their original spots rather than spread out through an encyclopedic museum, giving the tiny museum on Fifth Avenue—“the world’s favorite museum”—an unforgettable essence.
“The Met is a container for art, but the container in itself is pretty neutral. It’s just a building that is designed to put in pieces of works of art,” Salomon said. “This is somebody’s full creation as an individual putting together the collection that he wanted to see in his house. So it has a lot more character.”
It makes sense that, given the fact that it exists in a Gilded Age mansion built for entertaining, The Frick throws a killer party. On Monday, there was a gala dinner for the board and museum supporters, overseen by grandees such as Blackstone chairman and CEO Stephen Schwarzman and fellow billionaire Ronald Lauder, the namesake of the new exhibition galleries in the Selldorf-designed buildings.
And then on Thursday, the official opening reception kicked off at 6 p.m. as the sun set on the East Green. I didn’t spot Schwarzman, though maybe that’s understandable as Donald Trump’s post–“Liberation Day” tariff bonanza—very Henry Clay Frick Era, by the way—was absolutely hammering the markets. But those in attendance didn’t let a potential financial crisis get them down. New Museum director Lisa Phillips was there, along with former Whitney director Adam Weinberg and Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak. At one point Tom Eccles, director of the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, was chatting with Selldorf as former Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin bumped into Guggenheim director and CEO Mariët Westermann by the bar.
Everyone seemed a little shell-shocked to be having cocktails by the burping fountain in Mr. Frick’s garden court as servers wheeled around caviar-topped bites, with a few Goyas in the background. There were bars everywhere, and those in attendance were certainly imbibing, but this wasn’t exactly a full-on Frick house party—nobody I saw exploited their night-at-the-museum privileges to sit on the roped-off 18th-century French furniture.
At one point a rapping on a microphone echoed off the original marble and guests were ushered into one of the new vestibules.
“You’re 900 of our closest friends,” said Rüger, the new Frick director, addressing the crowd. “I’ve possibly been given the greatest gift any museum director could be given: a brand-new beautiful building that I didn’t have anything to do with.”
And then Rüger went over to cut the cake, to officially set off the ceremonies. It was an incredibly over-the-top confection, and has to have ranked among the most opulent exercises in the medium of batter and frosting: a to-scale replica of the building in which we stood, the mansion and its additions. It looked too pretty to cut, but this was a party, and Rüger sliced right into it.
The Rundown
Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…The flurry of tariffs announced by President Donald Trump on Liberation Day Wednesday will shake every industry to its core, no doubt. In my neck of the woods the talk has turned to the art market, which in the last two decades has exploded into a highly globalized trade wherein collectors fly around the world buying paintings that are shipped from one continent to another. And so now does that all…end? So many unknown factors remain: Will art be exempted from all the tariffs, or just some—or none? Are there shipping loopholes one can exploit, à la the runarounds some turned to in the wake of Brexit? Will art fairs get more expensive for dealers as shipping costs skyrocket? Will the tanking global economy put even more of a chill on demand for art? Remember, this is what the adviser Jacob King predicted to me the day after the election in November: Collectors may have thought a Trump presidency would bring tax cuts and surging markets to spur on art sales, but Trump will be Trump, and anything that disrupts the frictionless global exchange of culture just hurts the market. “The kind of chaos that Trump could unleash is impossible to account for,” King said back in November. Seems prescient!
…Springtime has arrived in Gotham, and one of the things that makes this the most glorious season to be in Manhattan is…well, it’s gala season, people! The Paris Review held its annual Revel at Cipriani 42nd Street, and upped the ante by hiring Lena Dunham as the master of ceremonies, effectively the evening’s host. Watching her lightly roast the icons of high culture such as novelists Emma Cline and Jeffrey Eugenides and playwright Wallace Shawn was so delightful—hell, maybe just let her host the Emmys or something? Plus, the honoree Anne Carson forwent the customary long-winded litany of thank-yous and asked British actor Ben Whishaw to join her in a dual reading onstage. Those hosting tables for the evening included galleries such as Karma, Gagosian, Timothy Taylor, Kasmin—and we’ll mention that there was a Vanity Fair table as well, and that editor in chief Radhika Jones sits on the literary journal’s board.
…One more meta shout-out to the magazine: Next week The Whitney will open a sprawling survey of Amy Sherald, and it’s a pretty special exhibition. There’s a number of the large-scale paintings that debuted at Hauser & Wirth in London in 2022, a constellation of work loaned by collections around the world, as well as what’s undoubtedly her most famous work: first lady Michelle Obama, who commissioned Sherald to make her official state portrait. But at Wednesday’s cocktail reception hosted by museum director Scott Rothkopf, another piece was getting almost as much attention: her painting of Breonna Taylor, the young woman who was killed in 2020 by police officers in Louisville after they entered her home in a botched raid. The wall text mentions that the work is co-owned by the Speed Art Museum in Taylor’s hometown and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (thanks to funds provided by the Ford Foundation, and by Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg). And the text also notes that the work was originally commissioned by Vanity Fair for its September 2020 issue, which was guest-edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s not so often you get to see a painting first made for the cover of Vanity Fair on the walls of The Whitney. It’s a special thing. Go!
…The art website Hyperallergic has a long history of doing joke posts on April Fools’ Day, but when it published a story with the headline “Trump Withdraws US From Venice Biennale, ‘Too Diverse’”—well, it’s understandable that some thought it was real. To be clear, it is not. The US is still planning on hosting a pavilion at the Giardini at the Venice Biennale in 2026…at least for now. But the fact that such a headline can ring true to a bunch of people, well, that just speaks to where we’re at.
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