In 2021, when the Frick Collection temporarily took over the Brutalist Breuer building that was once home to the Whitney Museum of American Art and a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was a peculiar fit.
The museum’s delightful stable of European icons were shuffled into boxy, modernist gallery spaces that lacked the opulent yet intimate surroundings of Henry Clay Frick’s Gilded Age mansion a few blocks away.
Thankfully, the collection has returned to its original Fifth Avenue home, arguably New York City’s most beautiful museum, after a five-year $220 million expansion, and will reopen to the public on April 17 (with some earlier previews for Frick members). But three years of exhibitions at the Breuer gave Frick curators a new perspective that informed how the collection’s paintings would be shown back in the museum’s wood-paneled period rooms.
“We got to know the collection in a completely different way,” Frick associate curator Giulia Dalvit told Hyperallergic. “Some paintings got to hold the wall by themselves and other paintings needed to have a little breathing space or a sparser environment.”
Longtime Frick patrons may not even notice any changes to the layout of the Carrère and Hastings-designed manor house’s ground floor. Johannes Vermeer’s jaw-dropping “Girl Interrupted at Her Music” (c. 1658–59) and “Officer and Laughing Girl” (c. 1655–60) are around the corner from the museum’s East 70th Street entrance. The bright, welcoming Drawing Room still contains more than a dozen Jean-Honoré Fragonard paintings from his iconic series The Progress of Love, made a few years before the Revolutionary War.
Next door, El Greco’s striking Saint Jerome portrait is still hanging out with Hans Holbein the Younger’s renderings of British frenemies Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell in the captivating Living Hall, which is filled with other 15th- and 16th-century works. And the West Gallery’s resplendent assortment of Dutch and Spanish masters including Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Velazquez, and Goya, joined by the museum’s third and largest Vermeer, “Mistress and Maid” (c. 1667), will remain a crowd favorite.
Wander a little further and you begin to notice the changes. The Frick’s second floor, which previously served as museum back offices, has been converted into 10 gallery rooms that will display additional paintings, sculptures, and ceramics in the institution’s permanent collection; these spaces will be open to the public for the first time.
With the help of Selldorf Architects and Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners, the Frick built a circular 220-seat auditorium with a surprisingly 21st-century design that will host a two-week music festival with work commissioned by contemporary composer Nico Muhly and performed by opera star Anthony Roth Costanzo. They also installed a marbled staircase connecting to its second floor gift shop, added a new public cafe, expanded its ground floor reception hall, and created a special exhibition space (three more Vermeers are on loan for a new exhibition, Vermeer’s Love Letters, opening on June 18).
Right: Giovanni Battista Moroni, “Portrait of a Woman” (c. 1575)
The Frick’s Chief Conservator Joseph Godla marveled at the renovations as journalists, critics, and architects hopped from room to room during a press preview today, March 25. He said restoring the private sitting room of Adelaide Frick, Henry Frick’s wife, known as the Boucher Room, was his most challenging task.
“We had to disassemble the room panel by panel, restore them, and bring them back up,” Godla told Hyperallergic. “The key was locating the fireplace exactly where it was and lining up the paneling with all the windows.”
Right: Boucher Anteroom
Around the corner is George Romney’s portrait of Lady Hamilton, who was 17 years old when she posed for the British artist. It remains a favorite of Frick curators.
“I always like to think of that picture as the first and last picture Frick saw every morning when he went to sleep,” Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier Solomon said at today’s preview, “and more poignantly, the very last picture he saw, because he died in that room.”
